! JJ?f•i^^ •'■-■' -;■.. -S "flP^l 






•''j;i!i' 



11 



HI/ '.'■• 'I 



Mii:!'^'-^^^^' 



^:lM';;:/':'.: 






f?'^^ ii;;<!. :^.i^, :i::;^' 








Ml 



!^] 



till 



1- ' 



'<ii«: 



fliiiiiiiiiiifi,;- •:■;;:■. 




Pass D^"lii_^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



christianizing 
the'social order 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



CHRISTIANIZING 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 



BY 



WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH 

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY 
IN ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 

AUTHOR OF "CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS" AND 
"PRAYERS OF THE SOCIAL AWAKENING" 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1912 

All rights reserved 






:e>'r\vS' 



Copyright, 1912, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1912. 



Norbjooti 5Pw0S 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



i 



©CI.A327331 



\ 



HILMAR, PAUL, AND KARL 

MY BOYS 
WITH A FATHER'S LOVE AND HOPES 



FOREWORD 

When '' Christianity and the Social Crisis " was pubKshed 
in 1907, 1 thought I had said all that God had given me to 
say on our social problems, and might henceforth with a 
clear conscience leave that Hne of work to those who carry 
less handicap than I do. So I went to Europe for a year 
and devoted myself to the historical studies which are my 
professional duty and my intellectual satisfaction. 

But meanwhile the social awakening of our nation had 
set in like an equinoctial gale in March, and when I came 
home, I found myself caught in the tail of the storm. 
''Christianity and the Social Crisis" had won popular ap- 
proval far beyond my boldest hopes, and the friends of the 
book drew me, in spite of myself, into the public discussion 
of social questions. Naturally my mind worked on prob- 
lems which had been raised in my book, but had not really 
been taken in hand there. I had urged a moral reorgan- 
ization of social institutions, a christianizing of public 
morality. Men asked: ''What must we do? And what 
must we undo? What social ideal should guide us? 
What methods can we safely use in realizing it?'' The 
most varied audiences followed the discussion of these 
problems with an intensity of interest that was quite new 
to me. Without the spiritual cooperation and stimulus of 
others this book would never have been written. 

In 1910 and 191 1 I had the honor of delivering the Earl 
Lectures at the Pacific Theological Seminary at Berke- 
ley, Cal., and the Merrick Lectiu-es at Ohio Wesleyan 
University. The latter lectureship carried the obligation 

vii 



Vlll FOREWORD 

of publishing the lectures in book form. I take this op- 
portunity to express my obligation to the Faculties and 
Officers of both institutions for courtesies which I shall 
never forget, and for providing the incentive to work out 
my thought in written form. These two lecture courses 
created the nucleus of this book ; the form, however, and 
much of the contents are new. 

The subject of the book needs no such apology as is im- 
plied in the foregoing statements. If there is any bigger 
or more pressing subject for the mind of a Christian man 
to handle, I do not know of it. The problem of christian- 
izing the social order welds all the tasks of practical Chris- 
tianity with the highest objects of statesmanship. That 
the actual results of our present social order are in acute 
contradiction to the Christian conceptions of justice and 
brotherhood is realized by every man who thinks at all. 
But where do the sources of our wrongs lie hidden? What 
has wrought such deadly results from a civilization that 
has such wonderful promises of good? How can we cease 
to produce evil in despite of our right intentions? How 
can the fundamental structure of society be conformed to 
the moral demands of the Christian spirit? 

The First Part of the book describes the present social 
awakening in the organizations of religion. Outsiders mis- 
judge the part which the churches are taking in the im- 
pending social transformation because they are ignorant of 
the quiet revolution that is going on in the spirit and aims 
of the American churches. Few, probably, even of those 
who are taking an active part in their social awakening, 
realize fully the far-reaching importance of this great his- 
toric movement. 

Part Two seeks to show that the christianizing of the 
social order was the very aim with which Christianity set 
out. That aim has long been submerged and almost for- 
gotten, but it has reemerged simultaneously with the rise 



FOREWORD IX 

of modern life, and now demands a reckoning with every 
religious intellect, offering us all a richer synthesis of truth 
and a more distinctively Christian type of religious ex- 
perience. 

Part Three subjects our present social order to a moral 
analysis in order to determine what is Christian in the 
structure of society, and what is not. This traverses some 
of the ground covered in my previous book, but from new 
angles. In spite of its critical character the net results of 
the analysis, to me at least, are immensely cheering. 

Part Four follows up this muster by showing that the 
unregenerate elements of our social organization are not 
quietly waiting till we get ready to reform them, but are 
actively invading God's country and devastating the moral 
achievements built up by centuries of Christian teaching 
and sacrifice. 

In Part Five I have tried to trace in advance those fun- 
damental lines of moral evolution along which society must 
move in order to leave its inhumanities behind and to 
emerge in a social order that will institutionalize the Chris- 
tian convictions of the worth of manhood and the solidarity 
of mankind. 

Part Six, finally, suggests the methods of advance, the 
personal and social action by which our present conditions 
can be molded into a juster and happier community life 
in which the Christian spirit shall be more free to work its 
will. 

If this book was to be written at all, it had to deal search- 
ingly with the great collective sins of our age. Evangelism 
always seeks to create a fresh conviction of guilt as a basis 
for a higher righteousness, and this book is nothing if it is 
not a message of sin and salvation. But its purpose is not 
denunciation. It is wholly constructive. Of ^^ Christian- 
ity and the Social Crisis'' it has been said that it is a book 
without any hate in it. So far as I know my own soul that 



X FOREWORD ^^ 

is true of this book, too. I have written it as a follower of 
Jesus Christ. My sole desire has been to summon the 
Christian passion for justice and the Christian powers of 
love and mercy to do their share in redeeming our social 
order from its inherent wrongs. 

WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH. 

Rochester Theological Seminary, 
October 4, 191 2. 



CONTENTS 

PART I 

THE SOCIAL AWAKENING OF THE CHURCHES 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Awakening of the Nation . . . . i 

II. The Response of the Churches .... 7 

III. Social Conservatism and the Church ... 30 

PART II 
THE REVOLUTIONARY DESTINY OF CHRISTIANITY 



I. Wanted : A Faith for a Task . 

II. The Social Christianity of Jesus . 

III. The Eclipse of the Social Ideal 

IV. The Rebirth of the Social Hope . 
V. A Religion* FOR Social Redemption 

VI. Social Christianity and Personal Religion 



PART III 
"OUR SEMI-CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ORDER' 



40 
48 
69 

83 
96 

103 



I. What do we mean by "Christianizing the Social 

Order" ? 123 

II. The Christianized Sections of our Social Order . 128 

III. Our Present Economic Order 156 

IV. The Law of Tooth and Nail 169 

V. The Last Intrenchment of Autocracy . . .180 

VI. The Reign of the Middleman 202 

\TI. Under the Law of Profit 222 

xi 



Xll 



CONTENTS 



PART IV 



THE INVASION OF GOD'S COUNTRY 

CHAPTER 

I. The Moral Values of Capitalism . 



II. Profit versus Life 

III. Commercialism and Beauty .... 

IV. The Institutions of Love and their Dangers 
V. Private Interests against the Common Good 

VI. The Tragedy of Dives . . . . 

VII. The Case of Christianity against Capitalism 



PAGE 

242 
252 
262 
272 
291 
311 



PART V 

THE DIRECTION OF PROGRESS 

I. The Channul Buoys 

II. Justice 

III. Property and a Job as Means of Grace 

IV. Economic Democracy ..... 
V. The Economic Basis for Fraternity 

VI. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus 
VII. '' The Powers of the Coming Age " 



324 
332 
341 
352 
365 
372 
384 



PART VI 

1 
THE METHODS OF ADVANCE 

I. The Pace of Advance 406 

11. The Conservation of Life . . . » .412 

HI. The Socializing of Property 419 

IV. Community Life and Public Spirit . . . . 430 

V. The Rise of the Working Class .... 448 

VI. The Revival of Religion and the Conversion 

OF THE Strong 45^ 



Index ....... o .. . 477 



CHRISTIANIZING 
THE SOCIAL ORDER 



CHRISTIANIZINCx THE SOCIAL 

ORDER 

PART I 

THE SOCIAL AWAKENING OF THE 

CHURCHES 

CHAPTER I 

THE AWAKENING OF THE NATION 

For the last ten years our nation has been under con- 
viction of sin. We had long been Hving a double Hfe, but 
without reaUzing it. Our business methods and the prin- 
ciples of our rehgion and of our democracy have always 
been at strife, but not until our sin had matured and 
brought forth wholesale death did we understand our own 
obHquity. 

Most of us were eager to get the better of our fellows 
by seizing some advantage which the rest could not get. 
Our vast continent offered unrivaled chances for this great 
American game. But of late we have begun to reaHze 
that some have played the game according to the accepted 
rules, but with unexpected effectiveness. The natural re- 
sources of the country are passing into the control of a 
minority. An ever increasing number of people are hence- 
forth to Kve in a land owned by an ever decreasing number. 
The means of trafi&c are the arteries of the social body; 
every freight car is a blood corpuscle charged with life. 



2 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

We have allowed private persons to put their thumb where 
they can constrict the life blood of the nation at will. The 
common people have financed the industry of the country 
with their savings, but the control of industry has passed 
out of their hands almost completely. The profits of our 
common work are absorbed by a limited group ; the mass 
of the people are permanently reduced to wage-earning 
positions. The cost of living has been raised by unseen 
hands until several milHons of our nation are unable to 
earn even the bare minimum which social science declares 
necessary for health and decency, and all families living on 
a fixed income have felt a mysterious and suffocating 
pressure. 

All this was the necessary outcome of our economic 
system, but it was a sore surprise to most of us when the 
process began to culminate and we saw the end of our own 
doings. 

When the people in anger turned to the means of self- 
defense provided by our political democracy, they found 
the weapons on which they relied in the hands of their 
opponents and leveled against themselves. The will of the 
people expressed through the ballot was often directly frus- 
trated by election frauds and bribery. Even when the 
votes were properly registered and counted, they were as 
ineffectual as a blow on the surface of a pond. They 
merely served to give legal sanction to the manipulations 
of a political oKgarchy whose will was the real force in 
shaping our affairs. When the popular will did succeed in 
framing a party platform, the men elected to carry it out 
balked like Balaam's ass, because some mysterious presence 
(not angehc) blocked the way, and the people had no means 
of compelHng their servants to obey them, or even of 
punishing the guilty with any precision. The most august 
and powerful body in the nation, the Senate of the United 
States, had become a fortification of predatory interests, 



THE AWAKENING OF THE NATION 3 

and great States were shamed for long years by the con- 
temptible men who were supposed to be their ambassadors 
at Washington. The federal courts, holding the final veto 
power over all laws passed in the land, were filled with 
men satisfactory to poHticians and big business.^ All 
courts had become so tangled in their own antiquated 
methods of procedure, and were still so permeated with 
conceptions inherited from the age of despotism, that the 
institutions of justice are to-day the chief props of social 
maladjustment. 

The history of American politics in recent years has 
been a history of the reconquest of poHtical Hberty. Our 
nation has been in the position of a city that wakes up to 
find an insurrectionary minority in military control, with 
barricades erected at all strategic points. For a decade 
the people have been storming these barricades and seek- 
ing to overthrow the unconstitutional powers which had 
become our de facto government. The States are now bar- 
ring out sinister financial influences by compelling the pub- 
lication of election expenses and limiting their amount. 
They are trying to weaken the political oHgarchies by 
direct nomination. They hope to cleanse and rejuvenate 
the Senate by direct election. They are sweeping and ven- 
tilating the worst corners of our common home, the cities, 
by uniform accounting and commission government. They 
are turning our so-called representative government into 
self-government by the initiative, referendum, and recall. 

All this is nothing less than a poUtical revolution. It is 
a second war of independence. It goes on all over the 
country with a curious unanimity of impulse which proves 
that it is not the artificial product of party agitation, but 
an awakening of the better self of the nation. 

When the people began to regain political power, they 

1 See William Allen White, " The Old Order Changeth," Chapter VIII, 
and Appendix, pp. 255-262. 



4 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

used it to get at the facts. A series of legislative investi- 
gations furnished X-ray photographs of our national in- 
wardness and threw them on a screen big enough for all 
to see. The magazines lectured us on the scientific material 
furnished. We saw the bribed voters of respectable coun- 
ties in the Middle West startled by sudden publicity, as 
a lot of cockroaches in a dirty kitchen scamper away when 
the Hght is turned on. We saw the legislators of great 
States crowding around the jack-pot as hungry as pasture 
cattle for the pail of salt. We saw a great corporation 
compelled to pay back huge sums stolen from the govern- 
ment. We followed private wires running from land frauds 
in the West way up into the dome of our government 
edifice at Washington. We saw the most imposing insti- 
tutions of banking and insurance caught in crookedness 
that had grown almost venerable and beautiful with age, 
Hke the patina that gathers on ancient bronze. 

The insurance investigation in which Charles E. Hughes 
gained national fame in 1905 was the beginning of enhght- 
enment for great numbers. Subsequent inquiries were 
less epoch-making because they merely corroborated and 
expanded popular information. The sense of national sin 
and dishonor has become a settled conviction. Only the 
report of the Chicago Vice Commission has been able to 
wring a new groan of shame and desperation from the whole 
nation. 

It has been a terrible process of national education. If 
in 1890 a prophet, personally conducted and introduced 
by an archangel, had predicted accurately one half of the 
facts which are now common knowledge, pubhc opinion 
would have dismissed him with incredulity. 

It is proof of the moral soundness of our people that when 
they did understand, there was a revulsion of feeling. 
The standards of collective morahty rose almost with a 
snap. Some men died broken-hearted when they found 



THE AWAKENING OF THE NATION 5 

themselves fixed by the stern gaze of this new moral feeling. 
Others are to-day looking in this new Hght at the fortunes 
they gathered by the old methods, and are wishing that their 
hands were emptier. 

Sin is the greatest preacher of repentance. Give it 
time, and it will cool our lust in shame. When God wants 
to halt a proud man who is going wrong, he lets him go the 
full length and find out the latter end for himself. That is 
what he has done with our nation in its headlong ride on 
the road of covetousness. Mammonism stands convicted 
by its own works. It was time for us to turn. 

We are turning. 

The other day I was walking along the seashore. A 
broad stretch of sand and slimy stones was between me 
and the water. Dead things lay about, stranded, limp, 
and gray. It was ebb tide. 

When I returned after a few hours, a magic change had 
taken place. Over the stagnant flats the waves were 
rolling briskly and eagerly, as if they were young. The 
gulls were dipping and screaming. Gray ripples far out 
showed where fish were schooling. All the world smelled 
and felt differently. The tide was coming in. 

The same sense of a great change comes over any one who 
watches the life of this nation with an eye for the stirring 
of God in the souls of men. There is a new shame and anger 
for oppression and meanness ; a new love and pity for the 
young and frail whose slender shoulders bear our common 
weight; a new faith in human brotherhood; a new hope 
of a better day that is even now in sight. We are invent- 
ing new phrases to name this new thing. We talk of the 
"social feeling" or "the new social consciousness." We 
are passing through a moral adolescence. When the 
spirit of manhood comes over a boy, his tastes change. 
The old doings of his gang lose interest. A new sense of 
duty, a new openness to ideal calls, a new capacity of self- 



6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

sacrifice surprise those who used to know him. So in our 
conventions and clubs, our chambers of commerce and our 
legislatures, there is a new note, a stiffening of will, an impa- 
tience for cowardice, an enthusiastic turning toward real 
democracy. The old leaders are stumbling off the stage 
bewildered. There is a new type of leaders, and they and 
the people seem to understand one another as if by magic. 
Were you ever converted to God? Do you remember 
the change in your attitude to all the world ? Is not this 
new life which is running through our people the same great 
change on a national scale ? This is religious energy, rising 
from the depth of that infinite spiritual life in which we all 
live and move and have our being. This is God. 



CHAPTER II 

THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 

The American churches are part of the American nation. 
They are not a foreign clerical organization grafted on our 
national life, but an essential part of it from the beginning, 
a great plastic force which has molded our public opinions 
and our institutions from the foundation up. They are 
organizations of the people, by the people, and for the people. 
When a great spiritual movement like the social awakening 
shakes our nation to the depths, we may be sure tliat the 
churches will respond to it and have an active part in it. 
And so we find it. 

Outside of the churches the social awakening is remark- 
able for the religious spirit which it creates in men who 
thought they were done with religion. They are getting 
a faith once more. They show all the evidences of religion, 
— love, tenderness, longings mysterious to themselves, a 
glad willingness to sacrifice time and money for the salvation 
of their fellows. What is this but religion ? 

On the other hand, with the people in the churches, who 
have long been consciously religious, the new thing is the 
social application of their religious life. The old current 
of their religion is pouring into a broader channel of social 
purpose, and running with a swift flow toward the achieve- 
ment of pubUc justice and love. Feehngs and enthusiasms, 
doctrinal ideas and moral purposes, which to a former 
generation would have seemed to have but a slender con- 
nection with religion, are now felt to be an essential part of 
the spiritual Ufe and, in fact, the great business of religion. 

7 



8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

All this is big with meaning and hope. It has come over 
the churches so swiftly that even their leaders hardly 
realize the extent of this social awakening and the signifi- 
cance of the movement of which they are part. Many 
outsiders still talk as if they had heard nothing about it. 
If we are to discuss the christianizing of the social order, 
we must know the spiritual forces which are rallying and 
volunteering for the task. 

Every great movement begins in the hearts of a few. 
^^The soul is still oracular." Amid the din of the market 
some listen to the voice within. They are usually the 
young men whom the world has not yet dulled and debased ; 
the able men whose large minds look beyond immediate 
need and profit ; the natural idealists predestined by hered- 
ity for noble ends ; and the religious hearts in whom the 
inner light has created an intuitive comprehension of pres- 
ent wrong and future righteousness. The best are those 
in whom these qualities combine. 

These prophetic minds condense the unconscious longings 
of the mass of men in concrete experience and thought. 
They become centers of new light and energy. They 
awaken and lead the rest because they utter clearly what 
others feel dimly. 

Social Christianity has had a brilliant succession of 
prophets in the older nations of Europe. Our own country 
has lagged a generation behind. The modern social prob- 
lem is the problem of capitahstic industriahsm and becomes 
acute only when a country becomes industrialized. ' We 
have been an agricultural nation until recently, and where 
industry did develop, the people still had the vastness of 
our land to ease the pressure of population and keep up 
the standard of living. Yet some foresaw what was 
coming. Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips, fighting 
for the emancipation of an enslaved race, foresaw a wider 
industrial conflict still to come. 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 9 

I want to pay the tribute of honor to three men who 
were pioneers of Christian social thought in America twenty- 
five years ago : Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and 
Richard T. Ely. These men had matured their thought 
when the rest of us were young men, and they had a spirit 
in them which kindled and compelled us. 

But all whose recollection runs back of 1900 will remem- 
ber that as a time of lonesomeness. We were few, and we 
shouted in the wilderness. It was always a happy svrprise 
when we found a new man who had seen the Hght. We 
used to form a kind of flying wedge to support a man who 
was preparing to attack a ministers' conference with the 
social Gospel. Our older friends remonstrated with us 
for wrecking our career. We ourselves saw the lions' den 
plainly before us, and only wondered how the beasts would 
act this time. In 1892 Terence V. Powderly, Grand Master 
Workman of the Knights of Labor, then the most powerful 
organization of labor in the country, said, ^' You can count 
on the ends of your fingers all of the clergymen who take 
any interest in the labor problem." Mr. W. D. P. BKss, 
editor of the brave Christian Sociahst paper, the Dawn, 
repHed by enumerating sixty-two ministers of his own ac- 
quaintance who were not only interested, but deeply inter- 
ested, in the cause of labor. (I count it one of my chief 
titles to mercy in the day of judgment that I was on that 
roll of the elect.) This was a triumphant reply to Mr. 
Powderly's assertion, but even Mr. Bhss, who probably had 
a wider personal contact with the Christian social move- 
ment at that time than any other man, knew only sixty- 
two names in the whole country, and padded the Hst by 
adding sixty other ministers who were members of the 
American Economic Association and therefore ^'presum- 
ably interested" in social problems. 

It is the contrast with those early days which makes 
the present situation in the churches so amazing. The able 



lO CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

ministers who were not already physically or mentally old 
by 1900, and who were not rendered impervious by doc- 
trinal rubber-coating of some kind, have been permeated 
by the social interest almost in a body. With the young 
men the social interest has become a serious rival of the 
old ministerial calling. Some turn to the settlements or 
to Y.M.C.A. work because it seems to offer more oppor- 
tunities for social usefulness than the pastorate of a church. 
When students in the seminaries are free to choose their 
own topics for Commencement addresses, a very large pro- 
portion of them give evidence that the social enthusiasm 
has affected them. The addresses often come closer to 
being real confessions of their faith than the creeds to which 
they may subscribe at their ordination. The imprudences 
of some social preachers are at least proof that the heroic 
spirit is being evoked in the ministry. Their unnecessary 
vehemence is often the psychological form which fear 
takes in a sensitive soul that nerves itself for a shock of 
assault. Very many ministers in recent years have en- 
tered into living sympathy with the old prophets who felt 
^Hhe word of Jehovah" burning within them. 

Perhaps the most convincing proof of the spread of the 
social interest in the ministry is the fact that the old men 
and the timid men are faUing in line. 

It is always a splendid victory of the spirit over the body 
when an old man compels his brain to overcome the phys- 
iological inertia of age and receive new ideas and convic- 
tions. In doing so, he comes out of the shelter of a system 
of thought which he has built in a long life and which 
hitherto seemed complete and sufficient, and takes his staff 
in hand once more to go in quest of the Holy Grail of truth. 
When a man of ripe years, whose religious horizon was 
formerly bounded by routine church work, soul-saving, 
and the premillennial hope, now opens his heart to the social 
hope of the new age, we may well feel the deepest reverence 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES II 

for such spiritual energy. But we may also be sure that 
these old men would not see visions unless a new pente- 
costal spirit had been poured out on all the disciples. 

And when the time-serving brother, who has so long been 
discreetly silent on social questions, wrapped in the fur- 
lined consciousness of being that highest type of the Chris- 
tian apostle, a '^safe man," grew thunderous on child labor 
and meat prices, we felt that our labors had not been in 
vain in the Lord, and were willing in love to suppress the 
surprised query of John the Baptist under similar circum- 
stances : ^^And who taught you to flee from the wrath to 
come?" 

The social interest in the Church has now run beyond the 
stage of the soKtary pioneer. It has been admitted within 
the organizations of the Church. Formerly some deter- 
mined spirit would force his ideas on a ministers' conference 
and be treated with good-humored condescension as a 
rider of hobbies. To-day the concerted study of social 
problems has become a common thing in ministerial clubs 
and conferences. Adult Bible classes and study groups 
turn by preference to books on the social teachings of Jesus. 
A valuable Hterature is being created to supply the need for 
cheap teaching material.^ Men's clubs, social unions, 
Chautauquas, and church conventions have created an 
active demand for competent speakers on topics of social 
Christianity. But the most astonishing change is in the 
temper of church audiences. Formerly speakers compelled 
the people to take their medicine whether they Hked it 

^ " The Gospel of the Kingdom," edited by Josiah Strong, pubKshed by the 
American Institute of Social Service (Bible House, New York City), was 
begun in 1909, has a circulation of 6000 copies, and is used by about 500 
classes and 12,000 students. The material has also been printed in the 
Homiletic Review. "Studies in American Social Conditions," a series of 
compact pamphlets, with an excellent classified bibliography in each, are 
published for the same purpose by Rev. R. H. Edwards. (Can be ordered 
at University bookstore, Madison, Wis.) 



12 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

or not, and became adepts in sugar-coating their pills. To- 
day speakers have to be on their guard lest they be swept 
along by their hearers. Utterances that would have 
seemed shockingly radical ten years ago are now applauded. 

Under the pressure of the social awakening the churches 
are officially seeking to get in touch with organized labor. 
In 1904 Rev. Charles Stelzle first attempted an exchange 
of delegates between the Ministerial Association and the 
Central Labor Council of Minneapolis. The idea was 
indorsed by the Presbyterian General Assembly and the 
American Federation of Labor. Probably about one 
hundred and fifty ministers of various denominations are 
now attending the meetings of union labor with more or 
less regularity. They have the right to the floor, are often 
called on, and in some cases have won marked popularity 
and influence.^ In this way they come into sympathetic 
contact with the great industrial working class, whose aims 
and moral quahties have hitherto been like an unexplored 
continent on the map of the churches. Under the advice 
of the Federal Councilof the Churches of America thou- 
sands of churches have set aside the Sunday before Labor 
Day as Labor Sunday; in 1910 the American Federation 
of Labor cordially indorsed this idea and advised its 
members to attend such services in a body. Some day we 
may see the ministers march in the Labor Day parade with 
the other workers, to assert their solidarity with the great 
fellowship of productive labor. 

In the last five years nearly all the great denominations 
have discussed the social situation and the duty of the 
Church at their national conventions. This in itself is a 
notable proof of the spread of the social awakening. Some 
of the national bodies meet only once in three or four years, 

1 Information about the exchange of "fraternal delegates'' can be obtained 
from the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor, 156 Fifth Avenue, 
New York City. 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 13 

and every hour of the time is jealously claimed by the 
estabUshed denominational interests. If the social ques- 
tions are given the right of way, there must be a strong 
public opinion demanding it. The meetings devoted to 
these discussions have repeatedly stood out above all the 
rest by their size and enthusiasm, and the barometric 
pressure felt by all. The GeAeral Assembly of the Presby- 
terian Church has had a noble history of more than a hun- 
dred years, but it never saw a greater meeting than that at 
Kansas City in 1908, when 12,000 people met to consider 
the relation of the Church and Labor. 

Since 1908 the denominations have begun to adopt 
formal declarations defining their attitude to the social 
problems. Of course resolutions are often cheap bluster 
at an absent foe. But resolutions condemning the actions 
of its own wealthy and powerful supporters are not Kkely 
to come to a vote in any convention unless the moral con- 
viction behind them is mature and irresistible. The 
masters of church assembhes are usually more than willing 
to let sleeping dogs lie without prodding them. The reso- 
lutions of recent years may settle nothing, but they indicate 
a great deal. 

The honor of making the first ringing declaration in a 
national convention belongs to the Methodist Church 
North. Every General Convention of the Church since 
1892 had been memorialized by some minor body pleading 
for action. In 1908 no less than thirteen annual con- 
ferences besides various preachers' meetings presented me- 
morials. The bishops in a cautious way devoted a large 
part of their episcopal address to the subject.^ The Com- 
mittee on the State of the Church presented a brave and 
outspoken report, culminating in a kind of Bill of Rights 
for labor, and ending in a splendid summons to all the min- 

^ General Conference Journal of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1908, 
pp. 130-137. 



14 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

tant forces of this great Church to do their part in the 
pressing duty of the hour.^ 

Immediately after the Methodist General Conference, 
in December, 1908, the Federal Council of the Churches 
of Christ in America was organized at Philadelphia, rep- 
resenting and uniting thirty-three Protestant denomina- 
tions. This organization marked an epoch in the history 
of American Protestantism. But no other session created 
so profound an interest as that devoted to ^^ Social Service.'' 
The report of the Commission was heard with tense feeHng, 
which broke into prolonged and enthusiastic applause 
at the close. The Bill of Rights adopted by the Metho- 
dist Convention was presented with some changes and 
adopted without the sKghtest disposition to halt it at any 
point. The following declaration, therefore, has stood since 
1908 as the common sense of the Protestant churches of 
America : — 

"We deem it the duty of all Christian people to concern 
themselves directly with certain practical industrial problems. 
To us it seems that the churches must stand — 

For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all sta- 
tions of life. 

^ General Coitference Journal of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1908, 
pp. 545-549. "And now we summon our great Church to continue and in- 
crease its work of social service. We summon all our ministry, bishops, pre- 
siding elders, and pastors, to patient study of these problems and to the fear- 
less but judicious preaching of the teachings of Jesus in their significance for 
the moral interests of modern society. We look to the press of our Church 
for enlightenment and inspiration. We look to our Sunday Schools and Ep- 
worth Leagues to awaken and direct the spirit of social responsibility. We 
demand of every agency and organization of the Church that it shall touch 
the people in their human relationships with healing and helpfulness, and, 
finally, be it remembered that we cannot commit to any special agencies the 
charge that all the Church must keep. Upon every member rests a solemn 
duty to devote himself with his possessions, his citizenship, and his influence 
to the glory of God in the service of the present age. And thus by their 
works, as by their prayers, let all Hhe people called Methodists' seek that 
kingdom in which God's will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven." 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 1 5 

For the right of all men to the opportunity for self-mainte- 
nance, a right ever to be wisely and strongly safeguarded against 
encroachments of every kind. 

For the right of workeis to some protection against the hard- 
ships often resulting from the swift crises of industrial change. 

For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial 
dissensions. 

For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, 
occupational disease, injuries, and mortality. 

For the abolition of child labor. 

For such regulations of the conditions of toil for women as 
shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community. 

For the suppression of the ^sweating system.' 

For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of 
labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree of 
leisure for all which is a condition of the highest human life. 

For a release from employment one day in seven. 

For a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and for the 
highest wage that each industry can afford. 

For the most equitable division of the products of industry 
that can ultimately be devised. 

For suitable provision for the old age of the workers and for 
those incapacitated by injury. 

For the abatement of poverty. 

To the toilers of America and to those who by organized 
effort are seeking to lift the crushing burdens of the poor, and 
to reduce the hardships and uphold the dignity of labor, this 
Council sends the greeting of human brotherhood and the pledge 
of sympathy and of help in a cause which belongs to all who 
follow Christ." 1 

Nearly every great denominational convention since that 
time has felt the obligation to make a serious pronouncement 
on the social questions. In several cases the social creed 
of the Federal Council was adopted ; for instance, by the 

1 "The Social Creed of the Churches," edited by Harry F. Ward, is an 
exposition of the planks in this platform. 



1 6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Congregational Council in 19 to. When any change was 
made, it was in the direction of still more radical emphasis. 
Thus the Northern Baptist Convention in 191 1 added: 
*^The control of the natural resources of the earth in the 
interests of all the people ; the gaining of wealth by Chris- 
tian methods and principles, and the holding of wealth as 
a social trust; the discouragement of the immoderate 
desire for wealth, and the exaltation of man as the end and 
standard of industrial activity.'' The Unitarians later in 
the same year adopted these Baptist additions and de- 
clared further ^^for proper housing; for the proper care of 
dependants and criminals; for pure food and drugs; for 
wholesome recreation; and for international peace; for 
such safeguarding and extension of the institutions of demo- 
cratic government as will permit and insure the mainte- 
nance of the rights of all against the encroachment from the 
special interests of the few." Instead of the abatement, 
they demanded ''the aboKtion of poverty." 

It was my intention to sum up the action taken by the 
various denominations in order to furnish evidence here of 
the spread and strength of the social awakening in the 
churches. But when I began to collect the documentary 
material, I found it so abundant that I could not do justice 
to it in the space available here. Some one ought to com- 
pile it all and give the historical setting in each case. These 
resolutions have registered the rise of a new moral intelli- 
gence and purpose, at least among the leaders, and have 
committed the churches to the solemn obligation of assist- 
ing in the public enforcement of these standards of conduct. 
They are vital material for American church history hence- 
forth. 

The leaders of the social awakening are now creating 
permanent organizations to educate the rank and file of the ^|il| 
churches and to give practical effect to the new convictions. 
As early as 1901 the Protestant Episcopal Church ap 



w 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 1 7 

pointed a Standing Commission on Church and Labor, 
and since 1907 Diocesan Commissions have been at work 
in a dozen dioceses.^ The League for Social Service is 
ofl&cially recognized as the Methodist organization for prop- 
aganda and is carrying on a very effective work of stimula- 
tion.^ The Methodist Church North requires its minis- 
terial candidates to study designated books on social 
questions. The Northern Baptist Convention has ap- 
pointed a Social Service Commission, which has issued a 
series of pamphlets and compiled an excellent course of 
reading.^ The CongregationaHsts have a Social Service 
Department.^ The most effective work has been done by 
the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor, or- 
ganized in 1903.^ 

The rise of social Christianity is felt in all the institutional 
agencies of the American churches. Those movements 
which are distinctively modern and devised to meet pres- 
ent-day needs are completely dominated by it. In union 
efforts it is also very marked because here the combined 
intelHgence of all denominations is massed. The Reh- 
gious Education Association, for instance, has from the first 
dealt with its large problems from the social point of view, 
and the social emphasis seems to grow stronger every year. 
The Young Men's Christian Association used to stand for 
religious individualism. The mere mention of ^^ sociology" 
once excited ridicule. To-day the association has devel- 

^ See Journal of the General Convention of 1910, Appendix X; publications 
of the Christian Social Union, especially No. 106. 

2 See the publications of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, 
pubUshed by Eaton and Mains, New York. 

^ See Social Service Series, and "A Course of Social Reading for Ministers 
and Workers," both pubUshed by the American Baptist Publication Society, 
Philadelphia. 

^ See the Report of the National Council of Congregational Churches, 
1910. 

^ See publications of the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor, 
obtainable of the Board of Home Missions, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York. 
c 



^8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIA. T.DEK 

f^r r^n^tructive social service, 

oped a splendid ^^^^^^^Xf w r^rproblems of entire 

and its leaders f ^ §-??' f J^',ou^ in a brave and far- 

comnxunities and of g^^^5 f "' ^^^^g^ and its interdenomina- 

sighted way. Its ^-^^^^t Ju^^^^^^^^^ that it had faith 

tional leadership ^^^^^^^^^Xo^ of the social needs with 
and sagacity enough to take no ^^^^^,^ ^^^.^^^^^ 

reasonable promptness. /^^^ %^ J,,^ative body, but in 
Association is f Rurally a mo -^^^ ^^^.^^^^ ,f ^ecur- 

^^^^ '\'^fX^ZTtXnr. working day for the 
l^en'riers L whose welf .e it ex... ^^^^ ^ ^^^^_ 

In the older rehgious -^^^^^^^Z the rise of the social 
ing of motive and appeal m response ^^^^^ ^^^ ^.^^ 

conceptions of CJ-^^^^^i^, J^oneY for foreign missions 
when the demand for men and mo y ^^^^ 

was based almost ^^^^^ "^^ut the saving knowledge 
of heathen souls ^^l^lZTil.^ nxissionary movemen 
of Christ. To-day the l^^f^^'^ ^^^n of the destmy of 
are teaching a statesmanl^e con^cept ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ 

Christianity as the ^P^"^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^ civilization. On 

common basis of a ;!«'-!^;^fchJ^^^^ i, not yet a conserva- 

the foreign field the ^'^'f^f^'^onc.u.st. There it really 
tive force, but a power of moral CO q christian 

embodies the finest ^P-^J^hrXeHfe of the backward 

nations in the effort to -P^f^^ 'he nA^ence of the EngUsh 
peoples. 1 There IS no doubt Aa the ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ 

^ Jnd Amirican P-testan^-X:^^^^^^^^ Chinese revolutions 
fi^n forces at work m the Turk shjm ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^f 

In Japan the g^^^^^atLe Christians and the spread 
connection between the^^^^; ^lissionaries, when they 
of sociahst ideas. The ablest ^^^^^^^^ ^^^1, 

return to their ^--^^^XmYtierto our own unchristian 
which the Church ^as^^^f ^^i.^tion of the missionary 
S^rdfaitr^rL^JUcfieathenis^^ Wher- 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 1 9 

ever the leaders of the cause have confronted the young, 
the educated, and the mascuHne sections of the community, 
as in the Student Volunteer Movement and the Laymen's 
Missionary Movement, they have been compelled to lay 
stress on the social conception of missions. In turn the 
stress laid on that aspect of mission work has contributed 
to the new grip which this cause has laid on the educated 
laity. Men of affairs have a natural affinity for social 
points of view, provided no selfish interests of their own 
cloud their minds. Thus the whole tone and spirit of mis- 
sionary thought to-day, as compared with that of a former 
generation, is proof that the social awakening has arrived. 
The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 
is another evidence of the ascendency of social Christianity. 
It was the most comprehensive evangeHstic movement ever 
undertaken in this country and was planned with consum- 
mate care and ability. Its leaders were determined to win 
the men back to religion by meeting the distinctively 
masculine interests ; therefore they had to be bold. On the 
other hand, they needed the financial support of men of 
wealth and the moral support of all kinds of churches; 
therefore they had to be cautious. When the leaders got 
together, before ever a gun was fired, it became clear that 
there was only one message with which all expected to go 
before the men of the country. All the varied departments 
of the movement found their spiritual center and unity in 
the idea of the Kingdom of God on earth, which is the doc- 
trine of social Christianity. When the movement began 
to be tried out, it grew increasingly plain that it was the 
trumpet call of the social gospel which rallied the audiences 
and brought men under moral and religious conviction. 
The men selected as ^^ social service experts'' stopped short 
of socialism and to that extent disappointed and even 
antagonized some portion of their audiences, but they set 
forth the social ideals of organized labor with tremendous 



20 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

freedom and force. Nor was the social message confined 
to the ^'social service" sections. ^'Boys' Work" and ^'Com- 
munity Extension" were closely allied in subject matter. 
It is safe to say that the promoters of the movement had 
no intention at the outset to give such prominence to the 
social message. But that makes the actual course of 
developments all the more instructive. The movement has 
probably done more than any other single agency to lodge 
the social gospel in the common mind of the Church. It 
has made social Christianity orthodox. But in turn it has 
shown what spiritual power lies stored in the Kingdom 
ideal, and has proved that the present generation, in the 
nation and in the Church, will not be satisfied with any kind 
of Christianity that does not undertake to christianize the 
social order. 

The movements to which reference has been made in 
their nature embody the progressive forces of the Church. 
On the other hand, the denominational publishing houses 
and the theological seminaries are usually citadels of con- 
servatism. They make a specialty of what is ^'safe." 
To-day the pubUshing boards of several denominations are 
putting forth Kterature which really sets forth the forward 
thought of the Church on social questions. Twenty-five 
years ago only one or two seminaries offered an articulated 
course on the relation of Christianity to the organic life of 
society.^ To-day there are few seminaries of first-class 

1 So far as I know, Andover Seminary deserves the wreath of the pioneer. In 
1879 Professor W. J. Tucker, now president of Dartmouth College, annexed 
a perfunctory lectureship in pastoral theology and turned it into a sociological 
course. An outline of the course was published in the Andover Review , 1889- 
1892, and stimulated other professors to attempt a similar work. The An- 
dover House, at Boston, 1891, was an outcome of these impulses ; it is now the 
South End Settlement, still under Robert A. Woods, as its wise and beloved 
head. Union Theological Seminary estabUshed Union Settlement in 1895 
and made the headworker lecturer in Practical Christianity. Graham Taylor's 
stimulating work at Chicago Theological Seminary began in 1892. Dr. 
Francis G. Peabody's first course was given at Harvard as early as 1880. 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 21 

rating that do not have a chair devoted to ^^ Social Ethics " 
or ^ Christian Sociology.'' Not that seminary education is 
now fully adjusted to the social conception of Christianity. 
When that conception gets through with its reconstructive 
influence on the theological curriculum, every department 
of our seminaries will have a changed aUgnment and a new 
vocabulary. But young men are no longer sent out to that 
highest form of social service, the Christian ministry, 
without some knowledge of the social nature and Ufe of 
men. 

As a crowning demonstration of the social awakening 
I offer the fact that the new social convictions have come 
near to getting lodgment in a creeds In every formative 
age the Church has felt the need of defining and anchoring 
its orthodoxy in formal statements of behef . If in all these 
stately documents there is any trace of social conscious- 
ness, or any sense that the Christian Church has the divine 
mission to change this sad old earth into the Kingdom of 
God, I should be glad to have it pointed out.^ But in 
1906, when the Congregationalists, the United Brethren, 
and the Methodist Protestant bodies, together comprising 
over a million members, were on the point of entering into 
organic union, a creed was adopted in which one of the 
five articles was wholly devoted to the social duty of the 
Church : — 

"We believe that according to Christ's law men of the Chris- 
tian faith exist for the service of man, not only in holding forth 
the word of life, but in the support of works and institutions of 
pity and charity, in the maintenance of human freedom, in the 
deliverance of all those that are oppressed, in the enforcement 
of civic justice, and in the rebuke of all unrighteousness." 

By 1905 it had reached the dignity of a Department with five instructors 
and eleven courses. 

^ The material for such a study can be found readily in S chaff , " Creeds 
of Christendom " (three volumes). 



22 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

We are tempted to add the damnatory clause so often occur- 
ring in older creeds: ^^Si quis autem contrarium senserit, 
anathema sit." 

Our religious denominations arejike a group of composite 
personalities. Each has its own inheritance of principles 
and historic traditions, its own form of organization, its 
own understanding of the Gospel. Like the character of 
an individual, this constitutes its sacred endowment and 
equipment. When some historian a hundred years hence 
undertakes to describe the present social transition, it will 
be an interesting task for him to make a comparative esti- 
mate of the influence which the various denominations have 
exerted on the awakening of the nation and the founding 
of a new social order. 

The Protestant Episcopal Church, for instance, failed 
to take any leading part in the older social conflicts with 
alcoholism and with slavery, but in the present struggle 
against industrial extortion it has furnished far more than 
its share of workers and leaders. The Church Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor 
(C.A.I.L.), organized by a few ministers in 1887, was prob- 
ably the first organization of social Christianity in this 
country. The close contact of the Episcopal Church with 
the Anglican Church brought it abreast of the advanced 
social movements in England. Its conceptions of the 
Church made it easier to outgrow Protestant individualism. 

By the establishment of its Department of Church and 
Labor the Presbyterian Church has won a preeminence 
which all may envy, but which none will grudge, for its 
work has been nobly free from denominational selfishness 
and has benefited all. That a Church so conservative 
by reason of wealth, social standing, and doctrinal tradi- 
tions has been able to set the pace for all in establishing 
friendly relations with organized labor, shows what 
capable leadership can do. Thousands of ministers have 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 23 

come from the ranks of labor. Why have not hundreds 
of them remained in working contact with it, as Charles 
Stelzle has done ? 

The Congregationalists, Baptists, Disciples, Unitarians, 
and Universalists, with their sib and kin, represent the 
principles of pure democracy in church life. That is their 
spiritual charisma and their qualification for leadership 
in the democratization of the social order. Their loose- 
jointed organization makes united action more difficult for 
them than for other churches, but they have been prolific 
of men whose freedom of thought and resolute love of justice 
showed that they had been suckled with the milk of inde- 
pendency. These denominations are apt to get less credit 
for their public service than those of strong church con- 
sciousness, like the Catholics and Episcopalians, because 
they insist less on having the activities of their members 
put forth under church auspices. For instance, the Broth- 
erhood of the Kingdom, formed in 1893, was one of the 
earliest organizations of social Christianity in the country. 
Its early members were all Baptists, and it might have 
become the organization of Baptist radicals, but it chose 
the broadest interdenominational basis on principle, and 
the denomination thus gets no credit for an enterprise born 
of its best spirit. 

. The Methodists are likely to play a very important 
part in the social awakening of the American churches. 
They combine the democratic spirit of the Congregation- 
alist group with a much stiffer and more centralized organ- 
ization. Their field has always been among the plain 
people. They comprise about 28 per cent of the Protestant 
membership and a much larger per cent of the conscious 
religious experience and conviction of the country. They 
have rarely backed away from a fight when the issue was 
clearly drawn between Jehovah and Diabolus. How 
hard they can hit, the Hquor trade will ruefully testify. 



24 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Both North and South their leaders are fully determined to 
form their bataillons on this new Hne of battle, and when 
they march, the ground will shake. 

The awakening of the churches is far from complete. 
The American churches, all told, had about thirty-three 
milHon enrolled members in 1906. To arouse and educate 
so vast a body is an enormous task. A large percentage 
of that number is either too young or too old to be inter- 
ested in the new social ideas. It will require at least one 
generation under the most favorable conditions to make 
this enlargement of the reKgious conceptions the common 
property of all. 

Some denominations have not yet awakened. For in- 
stance, the Lutherans have beautiful institutional chari- 
ties, but it is hard to discern any trace that as a body they 
are sharing in the new social enthusiasm. Large portions 
of them are isolated by their use of the German and Scan- 
dinavian languages. They have kept aloof from some 
of the older moral enthusiasms of American Christendom. 
They rank third in point of numbers among the Protestant 
bodies and claim more than two million members, but they 
have never exercised the influence in public hfe to which 
their numbers, the splendid qualities of their Teutonic 
stock, and the ability of their leaders would have entitled 
them. Their ministry is faithful to the older doctrinal 
issues of the Reformation and declines on principle to let 
the Church concern itself with social questions. They 
hold that the Church should preach the Gospel, admin- 
ister the sacraments, and leave it to the individual to do 
his duty in society and the State. The largest and most 
conservative of the Lutheran bodies, the Missouri Synod, 
even declines as a Church to organize institutions of char- 
ity, leaving it to associations of individuals outside of the 
Church. ''The real business of the Church is to preach 
the Gospel. It is not the mission of the Church to abolish 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 25 

physical misery or to help men to earthly happiness. Jesus 
says, If any man will follow me, let him deny himself and 
take up his cross daily.'' ^ In theory this position leaves 
individuals free for christianizing activity in society; in 
practice it leaves them unstimulated, uninstructed, and 
even sterilized against social enthusiasms. American 
Lutheranism might have rendered a great service to social 
Christianity in America by transmitting to us the mature 
results of social experience and thought of the German 
Church, just as the Episcopalians have transmitted the 
impulses of the Anglican Church. But thus far Lutheran- 
ism has buried its ten talents in a tablecloth of dogmatic 
theory and kept its people from that share in the social 
awakening which is their duty and their right. 

This is an illustration of the obstacles which the social 
awakening encounters in its spread. 

One of the most important practical questions is the 
attitude of the Roman CathoHc Church to the social 
movements. It is bound to be a powerful factor in the 
future of American society. In 1906 its members consti- 
tuted 36.7 per cent of the total church membership. In 
addition very many of that great majority of the popula- 
tion which is out of connection with the churches have come 
from the Catholic Church and still feel its spiritual influence. 
It is especially strong among the industrial working class. 
Probably a majority of the trades-unionists and of the 
labor leaders belong to it. It exerts a far stronger control 
over the social affihations and the ideas of its members than 
the Protestant churches, and does not hesitate to use its 
terrible disciplinary powers where the authority of the 
Church is at stake. 

Is the Roman Catholic Church affected by the social 
awakening, and will it do its full share in the moral work 
imposed on the Church? It is hard for an outsider to 

1 President F. Pfotenhauer in Der Lutheraner, 191 1, p. 150. 



26 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

judge. This Church is pecuKarly many-sided, a complex- 
ity of the most ancient and modern elements, a mixture of 
reactionary and progressive forces. 

As an international body, governed from the Vatican, 
the Roman Church is the greatest conservative force in 
the Western world. Its dogma, its theology, its phi- 
losophy, its ritual, its hierarchy, and its spirit of authority 
would certainly never come into existence if Christianity 
originated to-day in the modern world. They are rem- 
nants of a social life that is dead or dying except where 
the Church keeps it alive. By virtue of this inheritance 
from an older social order Catholicism is monarchical and 
hierarchical in its organization, and not even a century of 
development among the democracy of America has been 
able to wrest any serious concession from it. The official 
exponents of its thought are selected abroad for their 
conservatism, and they instinctively lean toward conserva- 
tive opinions on pubHc questions. When Cardinal Gib- 
bons in his Jubilee sermon condemned the Initiative, the 
Referendum, the Judicial Recall, and the direct election 
of United States Senators, the climax of his appeal was, 
*'What has been good enough for our fathers ought to be 
good enough for us." ^ There spoke the conservative spirit 
of Roman Catholicism. 

On the other hand, this Church excels Protestantism in 
its institutional charities, and there is always but a short 
step from remedial charity to preventive justice. Many 
of its priests live with and for the poor, and are splendid 
incarnations of personal democracy. If the entire Catholic 
Church in America could follow its own Christian and 
American spirit, unhampered by foreign tendencies and 
influences, there would certainly be a sudden and splendid 
spurt toward democracy. 

^ Oct. I, 191 1, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his priesthood 
and the twenty-fifth of his cardinalate. See Literary Digest , Oct. 14, 191 1. 



:he response of the churches 27 

The Church seems to be committed to a fight against the 
SociaHst Party J at least as it now is. The American Fed- 
eration of CathoHc Societies makes a systematic anti- 
sociaKst propaganda one of its prime objects. ^Xet our 
societies everywhere keep up the fight against sociaHsm, 
which was born in the brain of atheistic agitators and which, 
if permitted to gain a foothold, will bring in a state of revo- 
lution and bloodshed.'^ ^ Catholicism and Socialism are 
the two most powerful voluntary organizations in modern 
Hfe, and the impending duel between the two is of deep 
concern to us all. It will tangle the natural course of our 
poHtical development. 

But its opposition against Marxist SociaHsm does not 
stamp the Catholic Church as a purely reactionary force. 
Indeed, it will be compelled to uphold trades-unionism and 
radical social reform in order to give moral justification to its 
anti-sociaHst attitude and to neutralize the socialist influ- 
ence among its working-class constituency. There has been 
a decided increase in social interest among the priesthood 
in recent years. Several bishops have issued pastoral 
letters on social issues. The church papers discuss social 
questions freely. The Central- Verein of the German 
CathoKcs has a bureau for the study of social problems 
and the spread of literature. Professor John A. Ryan of 
St. Paul has put forth a far-reaching program of reform, 
which has been approved by many CathoHc professors of 
ethics and would probably have the indorsement of the 
majority of the priests. He demands a legal minimum 
wage, an eight-hour law, rehef for the unemployed, provi- 
sion against accident, illness, and old age, the housing of 
working people, public ownership of public utilities, ade- 
quate control of monopolies, taxation of the future increase 
of land values, and prohibition of speculation on the 
exchange. 

1 Annual Report of the Secretary for 1910. 



28 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The social awakening is an epoch in the history of the 
American churches, and it will move with the slow tread 
of great historic events. 

When the call of foreign missions came to our fathers a 
century ago, it was obeyed slowly and dubiously. It 
imposed heavy burdens on young churches that already had 
the enormous task of keeping pace with the nation in its 
westward march. It collided with cherished doctrinal 
convictions in some denominations. So a few admitted 
it to their hearts joyfully; important factions repudiated 
it altogether; the larger part acknowledged its claims in 
theory, but left it to a minority to sustain this new interest. 
The substantial laymen have surrendered to it only within 
a few years. Yet it was a movement born of the Christian 
spirit, and destined to christianize oiir home churches by 
the sacrificial heroism generated by it. 

In the same way the social mission of the Church to-day 
is accepted haltingly. It seems to load our weakening 
churches with a burden which no secular government on 
earth has yet handled adequately. This call too colHdes 
with firmly cemented doctrinal convictions about the sup- 
posed functions of the Church. Once more it takes great 
faith to believe that the Church will gain life by losing life. 
But as surely as the law of the cross is the supreme law of 
the Church, she will sicken and die of old age if she shrinks 
from her burden and quenches the spirit which is plainly 
speaking in her soul; and she will renew her youth and 
mount to a Christlike spirituality never reached before, 
if she will freely and without compulsion take up the cause 
of the people and follow her Lord on the Via Dolorosa. 

No fair-minded man should demand that a great com- 
posite body like the Christian Church shall be wide-awake 
and inteUigent at the dawn of a new era, while political 
parties, the Law, the Press, the colleges, and the working 
class itself are just beginning to rub the sleep from their 



THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES 29 

eyes. For years to come this new social interest in the 
churches will be vague, groping, sentimental, timid, and 
inefficient. We shall follow false cries and watchwords, 
like the mob at Jerusalem that shouted for Barabbas, 
when really they meant the freedom and glory of their 
country. We shall be Hke an army moving against a hill- 
side before the enemy's batteries are unmasked. 

But the Church is moving, and the Master of the Church 
is behind it. ^^He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall 
never blow retreat." Even in these first uncertain days 
the Church has builded better than it knew. It has created 
the situation that is to educate it. Those who come after 
us will judge how well or ill we played our part, but when- 
ever men hereafter write the story of how Christendom 
became Christian, they will have to begin a new chapter 
at the years in which we are now Hving. 

I confess that my faith falters in the very act of pro- 
fessing it. The possibilities are so vast, so splendid, so 
far-reaching, so contradictory of all historical precedents, 
that my hope may be doomed to failure. The American 
churches may write one more chapter in the long biography 
of the disappointed Christ, which our sons will read with 
shame and our enemies with scorn. But for the present 
the East is aflame with the day of Jehovah, and a thousand 
voices are calling. If failure comes, may it find our sword 
broken at the hilt. 



CHAPTER III 

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE CHURCH 

We are apt to think that progress is the natural thing. 
Progress is more than natural. It is divine. 

Men are impatient with the moral forces which are chang- 
ing the social order, because they have never comprehended 
the terrible tenacity and vigor of the social forces that 
resist progress. 

We are to smite a pathway for the Almighty in human 
affairs. What powers of resistance will we encounter? 
With what obstacles must we reckon? When a railway 
engineer plans a cut through a mountain-side, he first 
finds out what material must be removed. Is it loose dirt 
and gravel? A steam shovel will serve. Is it granite? 
He must order up drills and dynamite. 

The most important and persistent obstacle of progress 
is the conservative stupidity and stolidity of human nature. 
In history, as in physics, the vis inertice rules. Possession 
is nine points of sociology as well as of law. There are na- 
tions and races that have not changed appreciably for ages. 
To a student of history the astonishing thing is not that the 
people occasionally rioted and raged, but that they stood all 
this awful oppression and injustice with such patience and 
passiveness. Even a highly sensitive and mobile nation like 
our own rarely budges when the house next door is burning. 
It waits till its own roof is on fire. For proof I refer to the 
history of our tariff and labor legislation. 

The passive indifference of the mass of men is backed 
by the active conservatism of the most influential social 

30 



SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE CHURCH 3 1 

classes. In every social order the ablest individuals rise 
to controlling positions and intrench themselves in the 
places they have attained. Their effort is to preserve for 
themselves and their children the power and wealth which 
they have acquired. Knowing the power of the State, 
they seek to control politics. Knowing the power of pub- 
lic opinion, they influence the press and the schools. Their 
house is built on things as they are; therefore they are 
against any change, — except change that will further 
fortify their position. 

The financial and political forces which the upper classes 
have been able to manipulate in all past eras have been 
enormous, and the skill with which they handled them was 
always the best that could be hired. It is hard to see that 
all the sufferings of the revolutionary movement in Russia 
have seriously shaken the power of the classes in control. 
In our own country the demand for tariff reform ran for years, 
indorsed by both parties, yet it was always put off. When 
things finally came to the point of action in 1909, the bene- 
ficiaries of the tariff were found to be in control of the 
Congress that was to reform it, and the tariff was lowered 
upward, while the nation looked on, open-mouthed and 
stuttering with astonishment. It was a brilliant object 
lesson on the power of the conservative interests. 

We might expect considerations of justice and mercy 
to thaw through the icy indifference of class selfishness. 
But moral suasion is strangely feeble where the sources 
of a man's income are concerned. Few are impervious to 
public opinion, but the only public opinion that strikes 
men with full force is that of their own social class. When 
their own class supports them in a given moral attitude, 
they can afford to disregard the judgment of all other 
classes. Students, for instance, act on a code of honor laid 
down by the student community, and jest at the judgment 
of outsiders. The feudal nobility were very sensitive to 



32 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

any slight put upon their honor, but utterly regardless of 
the hatred and condemnation of the classes whom they 
exploited and oppressed. The justest and most moderate 
demands of the hungry multitudes have been treated by 
the privileged classes as wicked attempts to destroy the 
foundations of society and religion. 

In our country the absence of class demarcations and the 
intensity of public opinion make such an isolation and indif- 
ference far more difficult, but the same law holds. The 
working class leaders are preaching the duty of class con- 
sciousness. The leaders of the business class do not need 
to preach it. An eminent sociologist recently said that the 
capitaHst class is a hundred times more class conscious 
than the working class. Let us be moderate in our state- 
ments and say ten times. 

Another element in the general conservatism of society 
is the physiological conservatism of age. As we age, we 
are less and less responsive to new needs and ideas. We 
linger spiritually in the world that surrounded us when we 
were young and plastic. Only 13 per cent of the popula- 
tion is over fifty years of age, but this aging section of the 
community is the most influential section. Wealth, learn- 
ing, reputation, and social standing come to us slowly as 
we pass through life. We come to hold positions of trust, 
and can put others in places of power according to our 
judgment. No one need fear that society will ever lack 
conservative forces. The physiological laws of age will 
always steady us against innovation. Indeed, unless death 
released us when we age, society itself would age and die. 
The Angel of Death and the Angel of Birth are the guardian 
angels of progress. Without them any rejuvenation of 
society would be hopeless. 

Add to these personal forces of inertia the power of 
institutionalized tradition. We are most familiar with that 
power in the case of the Church. When theology or ritual 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 65 

contradiction of them. This is one of the points on which 
it is even more valuable for us to know the direction of his 
thought than his actual positions. It has taken the intel- 
lectual world eighteen hundred years to make some com- 
prehension of the law of growth a part of the working outfit 
of the human mind. If Jesus in childhood had entered 
into the modern outlook instead of the Jewish, it would 
certainly have been easier for him to work out that law 
with all its impHcations. At any rate he differed from his 
contemporaries in taking so long a look ahead, and the 
combination between far7sighted patience and indomitable 
persistence must be counted a pecuHar mark of the Chris- 
tian hope. Apocalypticism presents the Utopian form of 
the Kingdom hope. Those who hold it are marking time 
on a set of ideas derived from pre-Christian Judaism and 
incompletely christianized. 

7. But while he took the long outlook, he felt the near- 
ness of the Kingdom more than they all. To him it was not 
merely near, but here, germinating in their hearts, pulsat- 
ing in their common thoughts, reversing their valuation of 
things, sweetening their relations, Kfting the least of them 
above the highest representative of the old order,^ and 
quietly creating a new world. Apocalypticism had set 
up the theory of the two eras, ^^this age" and ^'the coming 
age,'' and separated them by a chasm. At least in some of 
his sayings we can see Jesus working away from that view 
to the thought that the old era was even then passing into 
the new. He said, you cannot draw a line, and say, Lo 
here, or, Lo there ; it is coming without clamor ; it is now 
among you.^ When will your boy become a man ? Look 
into his eyes and see the man now. 

^Matt. xi. II. 

2 Luke xvii. 20-21. The Greek phrase may mean either "within you" or 
"among you." In either case it is an assertion of the presence of the King- 
dom and a contradiction of the catastrophic expectations. 
P 



66 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

These are the points, then, on which Jesus differed from 
the current expectations, and at which he put his own pe- 
cuhar stamp on the Kingdom hope. The people expected 
the Kingdom to be set up by force, either human or celes- 
tial ; Jesus repudiated the use of force. They regarded the 
Kingdom as the prerogative of a select group : he insisted 
on sharing its rights with all, and turned it from a Jewish 
into a broadly human ideal. They connected it with the 
hope of self-aggrandizement, which they had learned from 
human despotisms ; he democratized the idea of the King- 
dom and put all who sought it under the law of service. 
They connected it with ceremonial and ecclesiastical reli- 
gion ; he set it within the domain of secular and ethical 
relations. To many of them the material benefits were the 
main thing and ethical conformity was the price to be paid ; 
to Jesus fullness of ethical and religious life for all was the 
real end and substance of the hope. They expected it 
by catastrophe ; he worked tow^ard the law of gradual 
growth. To them it was future ; to him it was both future 
and present. 

But all these corrections of the popular expectation did 
not involve the least surrender of the inherited hope of a 
reign of God on earth. Even when he saw death moving 
down on him to crush both him and his faith, he held fast 
to it. His promise to return is the form which his invincible 
faith took in the sight of death. 

He never transferred the Kingdom hope from earth to 
heaven.^ The Kingdom was so much of this earth that 
Jesus expected to return to earth from heaven in order to 
set it up. 

Neither did he ever spiritualize the vitality out of the 

^ The phrase " the kingdom of the heavens" is consta^ntly used by Matthew 
and has been the source of a great deal of misunderstanding. Mark and 
Luke use ''the Kingdom of God" in the parallel passages, and the two 
phrases evidently mean the same thing. ''The heavens" was probably 
used to avoid misuse of the divine name. 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 67 

Kingdom idea, as the Church has so constantly done. It 
was never a disembodied ghost to him, but a warm' and lov- 
able human reality. ^^ Jesus never held, and never could 
hold, a purely abstract, internal, spiritualized conception 
of the Kingdom, which claims only the inner world of the 
soul and its ethical outflow for God, and leaves the out- 
ward organization of the world with its thousand fold wrong 
and misery intact. To his mind that would have meant 
a bisection of the world into a spiritual kingdom of God and 
a material kingdom of the devil, and no sound rehgious 
faith can tolerate such a thing." ^ 

The purpose of all that Jesus said and did and hoped 
to do was always the social redemption of the entire life 
of the human race on earth. If we regard him in any sense 
as our leader and master, we cannot treat as secondary 
what to him was the essence of his mission. If we regard 
him as the Son of God, the revelation of the very mind and 
will and nature of the Eternal, the obligation to complete 
what he began comes upon us with an absolute claim to 
obedience. 

The later theology of the Church construed all his life 
from the point of view of the cross. All his efforts to win 
his nation for the Kingdom of God moved then toward pre- 
determined failure. Indeed, according to some views, the 
real redemption would have been frustrated if the people 
had accepted his leadership. In art, too, his image has 
been stripped of virility and turned into that of the meek and 
passive sufferer. But the Jesus with whom his enemies 
dealt, and from whom they backed away, was never very 
passive. He was high-power energy from first to last. His 
death itself was action. It was the most terrific blow that 
organized evil ever got. He always moved with a purpose 
and his purpose always was the Kingdom of God. At the 
beginning he really hoped to win his nation. When he saw 



1 Beyschlag, " Leben Jesu," I, p. 2 



^■2. 



68 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

isolation and death impending, he accepted the law of 
vicarious suffering as part of the method of redemption, 
and took Death by the hand as God's minister to bring in 
the Kingdom. His death was his greatest act of social 
service. His cross was the climax of the world evil and the 
turning point of history toward a definite and permanent 
emancipation and redemption of the race. All the great 
permanent forces of evil in humanity were strangely com- 
bined in the drama of his death : bigotry, priestcraft, des- 
potism, political corruption, militarism, and the mob 
spirit. They converged on him and did him to death. 
But he is alive, and now it is their turn. 



CHAPTER III 

THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL 

Christianity set out with a great social ideal. The live 
substance of the Christian religion was the hope of seeing 
a divine social order established on earth. But hardly had 
the social ideal of Christianity risen above the horizon 
when it went into a long eclipse. Not that its light was 
ever wholly obscured. Few eclipses of the sun are total, 
and even during a total eclipse the brilliant flames of the 
solar corona encircle the obscuring disk of the moon with a 
coronet of radiance that tells of the hidden fount of light. 
For the reverent student of history nothing is more wonder- 
ful than to see the Christian ideal misunderstood and per- 
verted, the Christian spirit betrayed, suppressed, and caged, 
and to watch them bursting forth again with the indomi- 
table energy of divine life. 

How was it that the social hope was so early obscured ? 
Why did it move from the center of Christianity to the cir- 
cumference, and change from a hot and living issue into a 
decorous relic of the past ? That question is of more than 
merely historical interest, for to-day the process is being 
reversed. The social ideal is moving back to the center 
and is getting hot with life. Those of us who want to co- 
operate intelligently with God in this reversal, ought to 
understand the causes which obscured the ideal in the early 
Church, and the causes which are bringing it to new power 
in modern Kfe. 

The explanation which I shall attempt will have to be 
fragmentary. The matter is so subtly connected with all 

69 



70 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the main drifts of Christian history that a volume would be 
required to do justice to the question, and I have only a 
fragmentary understanding of the process myself. Democ- 
racy has but recently begun to prod the scientific mind, and 
our older historians have only a bungling answer for the 
questions raised by the new social interest. The next 
generation will know more than we do about this problem, 
for the social spirit is beginning to carry the candle of 
investigation through the cluttered attic of Church His- 
tory, hunting for the mislaid records of Christian democ- 
racy.^ 

The cause which must be ranked first in order of time 
was the gradual emancipation of Christianity from its 
earliest Jewish environment. The intense democracy of 
early Christianity was largely a Jewish inheritance. In 
Judaism the hope of the reign of God on earth, thanks to 
such religious teaching as no other nation had, had become 
a dogma of the popular faith, a common axiomatic convic- 
tion. On the other hand, in Greek and Roman life there 
were only a few academic and poetic glimmerings of such 
a hope, and Christianity had to create it by its own re- 
sources. Consequently the social hope began to fade in 
intensity as Christianity was assimilated by its new Graeco- 
Roman environment.^ 

The social hope continued to be nourished by Jewish 
influences even after Christianity had cut loose from living 

^ For an interesting reexamination of church history, see Conrad Noel, 
"Socialism in Church History." The various writings of Richard Heath 
exempHfy the spirit in which the material ought to be approached. My 
book, ''Christianity and the Social Crisis," Chapter IV, traverses some of 
the road traveled in this chapter. Professor H. C. Vedder, "Socialism and 
the Ethics of Jesus," Chapter XI, has dealt with the same subject. 

2 Albrecht Ritschl : " While the Graeco-Roman world was entering the 
Church, nothing exerted so little influence on its efforts for the moral re- 
generation of men as the aim of realizing the Kingdom of God in the sense 
in which Christ had conceived it." Herzog's "Real-Encyclopaedie," Vol. 
XII, 2d edition, the article "Das Reich Gottes." 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL 7 1 

Judaism. The Old Testament with its social ideals, the 
Jewish apocalyptic literature with its revolutionary tone, 
and the inspirational prophetic life in the primitive Church 
continued the social influence of Judaism. But gradually 
the concrete social promises of the Old Testament were 
etherealized by allegorical interpretation. The uncanonical 
apocalyptic books were shelved as the New Testament 
canon narrowed down the range of reading in the Church. 
The ^^prophesyings'' of the early days were discouraged 
as the Church grew clerical and set on orthodoxy.^ 

The terrible struggles of Jewish patriotism against 
Roman domination in the Jewish War of a.d. 70 and in the 
later massacres and revolts created a bitter anti-Jewish 
feeling in large portions of the civilized world, and this 
popular sentiment affected the Christians. The Kingdom 
hope suffered by this, for all the traditional imagery con- 
cerning the Kingdom was Jewish in its drapery and color- 
ing. How could a patriotic Greek or Roman make Jeru- 
salem, a ruined city in a despised Kttle country, the center 
of all his social hopes, and long for the descent of a New 
Jerusalem? It became a convincing argument against 
the millennial hope to call it ^^ Judaizing." 

Thus the transition from the Jewish to the Greek environ- 
ment, which constituted the first great crisis and epoch 
in the history of the Church, was one cause which ob- 
scured the social ideal. The form in which the social hope 
was presented was another cause. 

The Kingdom ideal had not remained at the altitude to 
which Jesus had lifted it, but had relapsed into the crude- 
ness of pre-Christian apocalypticism. Jewish apocalyptic 
books were edited for Christian consumption by slight 
additions and changes. The atmosphere of studied mys- 
tery, of unreality and stage calcium lights, which char- 

1 See the admirable article by Harnack on the "Millennium," in the " En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica." 



72 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

acterizes all apocalypticism, was doubtless wonderfully 
attractive to some, but surely also distasteful to others, 
especially to the educated men. In the conservative and 
less intellectual Church of the West the millennium re- 
mained an undisputed asset of theology even in the third 
and fourth centuries. It was plainly taught in Scripture; 
the Gnostic heretics rejected it, and that fact certified its 
orthodoxy. But it was carried on the books as an incum- 
brance of theology, much as demonology is in modern the- 
ology. It had lost its religious fervor for the educated 
leaders. 

In the Greek Church it was crowded even out of theology. 
An earthly millennium with rich harvests, fat cattle, and 
marriage festivities seemed a contradiction of the funda- 
mental Christian aspirations to the theologians of the 
Alexandrian school. Did not salvation consist in overcome 
ing the carnal lust of the body and the fatal charm of earthly 
possessions in order to attain the spiritual and eternal 
life ? How, then, could they teach people to desire a thou- 
sand years more of earthKness? So Greek theology ex- 
purgated the Scriptures of all millennialism. The Apoca- 
lypse of John was thrown bodily out of the canon of the 
Greek Church for centuries. The vine and fig tree of the 
Old Testament were allegorized and spiritualized till only 
a disembodied soul could sit under them with comfort. 
The concrete, human, historic Jesus, whose aim was to 
establish a righteous life for his people, was supplanted by 
the heavenly Logos- Christ who gave immortality and made 
men partakers of the divine nature. In the Eastern half of 
Christendom theology permanently undermined the social 
hope. 

Throughout the Church the hope for the Reign of God 
was bound up with the expectation of the visible return of 
Christ, who was to inaugurate it, and when the first, and 
the second, and the third generation passed away, and the 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL 73 

Lord had not returned, the millennial hope lost its first 
freshness and intensity and changed from a religious passion 
into a theological reminiscence. 

Another most important cause for the fading of the 
social hope was the ascendency of the other-worldly hope. 
The religious ardor which had glowed in the expectation of 
the Lord's return to establish his millennial reign now 
burned with ever increasing intensity in the hope of heaven 
and immortality. Above the starry firmament was a 
heavenly world where God was enthroned in glory amid the 
host of the angels. Thence the Saviour had descended to 
reveal the laws and impart the powers of that upper world 
to men, that we too might ascend at death and live forever 
with the ransomed in his presence. In this world of sin 
and pain and death there is no abiding city. The true 
home of the soul is yonder, and we must make our pilgrim- 
age through this vale of tears with ceaseless longing. To 
love this world and care for its possessions is equivalent to 
spiritual failure. The soul must be trained by ascetic 
discipHne to detach itself, not only from the sins of the 
flesh, but even from the desire for food and comfort, from 
the love of wife and child and home, in order to concen- 
trate all its desires and forces on the attainment of salvation 
in heaven. 

This other-worldly longing was not Hebrew, but Greek 
in its origin. BeHef in Hfe after death played no appreciable 
part in Jewish religious life till after the Babylonian Exile. 
In the teachings of Jesus it was firmly lodged, but not at all 
central in importance. On the other hand, in contemporary 
Greek Hfe it was intensely strong. All the reHgions that 
had real vitaHty in the first three centuries tried to satisfy 
the desire for assurance of immortahty, and the Greek 
mind seized on that aspect of the Christian rehgion above 
all others. So the Church developed it until it became 
almost the exclusive content of Christianity. All through 



74 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the Middle Ages life was dominated by the belief in a super- 
natural world. The medieval Church was, able to wield 
such power because it had the keys of heaven ; its doctrine 
showed how to get to heaven ; its sacraments imparted the 
heavenly life. Baptism exorcised the powers of darkness, 
sterilized the leaven of original sin, and implanted eternal 
life ; confirmation conveyed the Holy Ghost ; the eucharist 
fed the famishing soul with heavenly life; penance and 
absolution cleansed away the guilt that would otherwise 
condemn to hell ; extreme unction prepared the dying soul ; 
burial in consecrated ground or, if possible, inside of a 
church and in holy garments protected against the greedy 
fiends that might snatch the soul when the trump of the 
archangel summoned all on the Dies Irce, Masses and 
indulgences followed the soul even across the chasm of 
death to shorten the stay in purgatory and hasten the 
entrance to heaven. All the ascetic practices and all the 
enormous growth of monastic life were ethical corollaries 
of other-worldly religion. The tremendous political power 
of the Church and its vast landed wealth during the Middle 
Ages were the outcome of the universal desire for heaven 
and testify to its absorbing strength. The immortal poem 
of Dante proves how completely even the greatest minds of 
that age lived in that conviction and desire. 

Around this belief the superstitious excrescences of reli- 
gion sprouted, but the belief itself was not an excrescence, 
but the essence of the working creed of Christendom till 
our own time. The reformatory sects of the Middle Ages 
shared it with the Roman Catholic Church. The Refor- 
mation preached more spiritual and intellectual processes 
of obtaining salvation, but the other-worldly aim of salva- 
tion remained the same. In devout Protestantism a deep 
longing for heaven and distrust for the body as an enemy 
of the soul were regarded as marks of a Christian frame of 
mind. A diluted form of asceticism continued wherever 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL 75 

religion was taken seriously. The Puritan contempt for 
worldly pleasures, the simplicity of dress among Men- 
nonites and Quakers, the Methodist suspicion of amuse- 
ments were Protestant forms of the same instinct which 
had filled the medieval monasteries. ^^ Pilgrim's Progress" 
tells the story of salvation ; but it describes it as a breaking 
away from this earthly life and as a concentration of all 
powers on the attainment of heaven. Milton and Bunyan 
inhabited the same spiritual world as Dante. 

This other-worldly concentration of religious desire and 
energy still dominated the Christian life of the generation 
just preceding ours. It practically constitutes the gospel 
now preached in a majority of American churches. The 
really effective religious ideas are more faithfully mirrored 
by the hymns of a given time than by its theology and ser- 
mons, and a study of our hymnals, especially of the innumer- 
able collections of Gospel hymns which are a really native 
expression of American Christian hfe, gives an overwhelm- 
ing impression of the predominance of other-worldly de- 
sires. ''In the Christian's home in glory;" ''Shall we 
meet beyond the river?" "I will sing you a song of that 
beautiful land, the far-away home of the soul;" "That 
will be glory for tqc" — what endless variations of the 
same great theme ! . 

I have no desire to disparage this type of religion. My 
own youth was nurtured in it, and even its defects have 
something of dearness to me, like the narrow staircases and 
sloping ceilings of an old home. It has been the comfort 
and stay of the bruised and lonely when the wings of the 
death angel had brushed their doorpost. It makes the 
eternal choice between right and wrong concrete and 
tremendous by showing the goal to which each path leads. 
It strengthens the dawning consciousness of God and the 
higher life in the young. It has bred strong souls by the 
self-restraint and discipline it imposed. It has added 



76 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

immeasurably to the valuation put on human life that even 
the humblest man is an immortal soul, and that in the end 
the serf and the noble will stand on equal terms before the 
judgment seat. Strong faith in a life to come has been 
one of the most powerful forces of social control in the past, 
a chief influence in making the present life clean, tender, 
and worth Hving. 

But after all, the desire for rest in heaven is not the social 
hope of the Reign of God on earth with which Christianity 
set out. The atmosphere of detachment from this world 
and of longing for death is not the atmosphere in which 
Jesus lived in Gahlee. He did not estimate the values of 
life from that point of view, nor lay the emphasis in reK- 
gion that way. The current of religious energy which made 
the hope of immortality incandescent was diverted from the 
hope of a divine social life on earth and left that hke a 
dark lamp. Other-worldly religion developed only those 
ideas and those ethical motives in religion which served 
the salvation of the individual in the life to come, and left 
many of the other talents of Christianity buried in a 
napkin. It overdeveloped some sides and underdeveloped 
others. Thus it contributed to the eclipse of the hope of 
the Kingdom. If, nevertheless, it has exercised a profound 
influence on private and pubHc morality and has practically 
helped to prepare for the Kingdom of God on earth, that 
proves that the Christian religion is charged with such an 
amazing social dynamic that even its leakages and by- 
products have had a revolutionary effect on society. What, 
then, will it do when it takes the moral renewal of society 
in hand consciously ? 

Another chief cause for the eclipse of the social hope was 
the ascendency of the organized institutional life of Chris- 
tianity, — the Church. The Kingdom of God is an ideal 
demanding both the highest spiritual fervor and the most 
practical sagacity for its realization. The fervor was 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL ^^ 

absorbed by mysticism and the longing for heaven; the 
sagacity by the tasks of church hfe and organization. 
Heaven and the Church together drained the Kingdom 
ideal of the spiritual force needed for its vitality. 

The practical creation of a Christian social order would 
employ all the constructive social ability of Christian men. 
It would be the greatest of all political tasks — taking the 
word ^^poHticaP' in its highest sense. But the organizing 
ability of Christian leaders from the outset was employed 
in building up one great social structure within the social 
order, — the Church. They have always toiled with enor- 
mous spiritual energy to organize it, expand it, enrich it, 
supply it with the material basis of noble buildings, and 
stimulate and educate its human resources. This task has 
required all the greater ability because the Church had to 
rely in the main on voluntary support and effort, while the 
State can use the easier method of compulsion. How 
completely the energy of the ministry is absorbed in the 
task of keeping the Church going, any minister can tell if 
he stops to consider. Even if a minister wants to employ 
some of his time in social effort, he often finds himself 
pulled back by the demands of the organization which has 
the first claim on his time. 

While Christianity was opposed and suppressed by the 
Roman Empire any effort to reconstruct the social order 
from a Christian point of view would have met with small 
thanks. The churches were grateful when they were let 
alone. They were like socialist locals in the era of repres- 
sion in Germany, or like Protestant churches in Spain. 
All they could do was to form small communities, keep their 
people away from heathenism, knit them together by spir- 
itual cohesion, and educate them in Christian living. Their 
social achievements along these lines are worthy of all 
admiration. They created little groups of fraternal democ- 
racy, called one another ^'brother" and acted on the name, 



78 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

purified the relation between husband and wife, gentled 
the relation of parents and children and of masters and 
slaves, and made mercy toward the poor so essential a part 
of their practice that begging in time became actually a 
virtue.^ They built up a chain of such organizations so 
firm that when all the weight of the Empire was thrown 
on it twice for ten years at a time, it stood the strain.^ 
The Church thus built up a State within the State, and its 
constructive ability was expended on that task. But in 
thus confining its political activity it limited its political 
outlook. When the Church emerged from the era of 
oppression, it had a powerful organization to be maintained 
and the conviction that to maintain that organization was 
practically the whole social duty of Christianity. Since 
that was the formative age of the Church, the precedents 
and theories then created settled the fundamental policy 
for subsequent times. 

When the era of suppression ended at the- beginning of 
the fourth century, the opportunity to christianize the social 
life in wider ways had arrived. But by this time much 
of the revolutionary spirit of Christianity had died away. 
Some humanizing influence was exerted, but the chief con- 
cern of the church leaders was for the Church itself and 
for the clergy. All human organizations develop a kind of 
corporate egotism, a collective hunger and self-assertion 
that endangers the higher ends for which they were created. 
When our political parties get into power, their first con- 
cern is apt to be for ^Hhe organization" and not for the 
country. The Church is only an agency to create the 
Kingdom -of God, but practically it came to regard itself 
as the Kingdom. Does not Christ reign where his Church 
reigns ? Is not his Kingdom advanced when his Church is 
strengthened ? That practical substitution received theo- 

1 On the social efficiency of the early Christian churches see ^' Christianity 
and the Social Crisis," Chapter III. 2 ^.d. 250-260 and 303-313. 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL 



79 



retical support through the philosophy of history devel- 
oped in Augustine's ^^City of God." Far beyond the in- 
tention of Augustine men inferred that the civitas of 
carnal men was the State, and the civitas Dei which he 
traced through history was the organized Church. Such 
an identification involved a terrible condemnation of the 
State and the existing social order. The present social order 
was due to sin, governed by Satan, held together by vio- 
lence, and characterized by private wealth and injustice. 
No condemnation of capitalism by socialist thinkers has 
ever been quite so severe as the theory of the State devel- 
oped by the Catholic Church.^ On the other hand, the 
organized Church appeared with the halo of the social 
ideal. Services rendered to civil society were robbed of 
most of their moral value and religious motive. The 
Church stood out as the all-embracing object of Christian 
devotion and service. That involved an eclipse of the 
Kingdom ideal, for the Kingdom is the reign of God in the 
common life. The territory within which it must develop 
is the social order. The conception that the State is 
Satanic, discouraged faith in the possibiHty of a Christian 
civil order. 

The Church did embody a fractional part of the Kingdom 
ideal. Alongside of a cruel and tyrannical social order it 
built a duplicate social order which really rested on a nobler 
foundation. The law of Christ was still its ultimate char- 
ter, and appeal always lay to that highest tribunal. De- 

^ When the great Pope Gregory VII was engaged in his struggle against 
the Emperor Henry IV, he wrote, a.d. io8i, to Bishop Hermann of Metz 
about the nature of civil and ecclesiastical government and the relation of 
the two, and this is his theory of civil rulers : ''Who does not know that kings 
and princes are descended from those who in ignorance of God, plainly under 
the impulse of the prince of the world, the devil, by pride, robbery, perfidy, 
murders, and in short by nearly all kinds of crime sought in blind greed 
and intolerable presumption to tyrannize over their equals and fellow-men ?" 
The letter maybe found in Mirbt, " Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums," 
2d edition, pp. 105-112. 



8o CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

generate and tyrannical as many of the clergy were, the 
best among them were almost the only socialized intellects 
to be found at that time, the only social workers to whom 
the common people could turn amid •the oppression of civil 
society. The fact that so many of the best men entered 
the service of the Church, and that the sins of the Church 
were felt more keenly than those of the civil governments, 
prove that it must have been the highest social expres- 
sion of Christianity which men then knew. It was able to 
command that devotion which is given only to social ideals 
connected with religion. Very much of the real good ac- 
compKshed by the Church it accomplished not as the expo- 
nent of revealed religion, nor as the institution of super- 
natural salvation, nor as the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but 
as the highest social good that men could discover in their 
life. 

To get a really just estimate of the social value of the 
Church in the past, we must not measure it by the abstract 
standards of modern ethics, but compare it with the other 
social forces and organizations existing in the contempo- 
rary social order. We tacitly assume that if the Church 
had not used its power tyrannically, justice and freedom 
would have prevailed. On the contrary, some other social 
organization would probably have used that same power 
even more tyrannically. In the Eastern half of Christen- 
dom the Church never had enough independence and 
vigor to wrestle with princes and emperors as it did in the 
West. Consequently, the State used it as a mere tool with- 
out the courage or power of protest. Is it accidental, then, 
that in the domain of the Eastern Church despotism is 
still unbroken to-day, while in the domain of the Western 
Church it has been permanently shattered ? As compared 
with the despotic State the Church was still a fulcrum for 
the lever of God. It kept alive the ideal of a social organ- 
ization ruled by Christ, and within that organization the 



SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE CHURCH 33 

are institutionalized, and formulated as creeds, rubrics, 
and ordinals, they outlast the eternal hills. Untold spirit- 
ual and physical sufferings have been necessary to break 
through such codified conservatism and secure any change - 
in rehgion. But Law has the same conservative bent as 
theology. Its customs and precedents and traditions are 
as faithful and chnging as an hereditary disease.^ But if 
precedents are not tough enough, we institutionalize them 
in law, and if law proves revocable, we put it in the Consti- 
tution. After that we can rest from our labors, and our 
works will follow us. Law needs reformation quite as 
much as theology, and in our country it has received far 
less of it. Our nation has come to the point where the 
Constitution of the United States urgently needs revision, 
but before we get it, we shall discover what it signifies 
when tradition is institutionahzed. 

If to all this interlaced network of forces that bind down 
the mobility of society we have to add the power of a 
reactionary Church, the case becomes desperate. 

Time was when the clergy could match their power 
with that of kings and emperors. Their influence has 
decHned, but even to-day no government defies them will- 
ingly. No city administration in our country would care 
to have the pulpits of the city reverberate against it. A 
preacher enjoys a unique immunity from contradiction. 
To some extent he can invest his personal ideas with the 
authority of religion itself. However it may be in our own 

1 Goethe in "Faust" : — 

"Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte 
Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort ; / 

Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte / 

Und riicken sacht von Ort zu Ort. y "^ 

Vernunf t wird Unsinn, Wohltat Plage ; 

Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist ! f \ 

Vom Rechte, das mit uns geboren ist, 
Von dem ist, leider ! nie die Frage." 

D 



34 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

country jtnone will deny that in other countries and in past 
times the clergy have often fanaticized the people against 
their own liberation. They have inspired the ruling classes 
with a firmer conviction that the maintenance of their 
rights was the will of God. Most of us can understand to 
some degree the accumulated resentment with which the 
common people in the old countries regard their clergy. 

The power of rehgion is almost illimitable, but it is not 
necessarily beneficent. Religion intensifies whatever it 
touches, be it good or evil, just as electricity turns a magnet 
into an electromagnet. There is no love so tender, no 
compassion so self-sacrificing, no courage so enduring, as 
the love and compassion and courage inspired by religion. 
But neither is any hatred so implacable or any cruelty so 
determined as religious hatred and cruelty. Mormon 
polygamy still persists in the face of law, public sentiment, 
and social evolution, because it is supported and sanctioned 
by Mormon religion and theology. When we pray for more 
religion, let us pray for a religion that is dedicated to the 
better future and not to an evil past. 

We realize so strongly that the Christian spirit is the 
most progressive of all moral forces that we are apt to 
forget that the Church in the past has been the most con- 
servative of all institutions. It is venerable with age and 
it venerates its own venerability. It carries a great body 
of traditional thought for which it claims divine wisdom 
and authority. It has claimed divine rights even for its 
official form of organization. Consequently it has kept up 
fossil customs for a thousand years. The Russian Church 
and the Roman Church each perform their ritual in a lan- 
guage that was living when each Church was young, but 
which has now been unintelligible to the people for many 
centuries. This is a symbol of far larger facts. The 
Church identifies itself with the social conditions of an age 
and then clings to them when they are passing away. So 



SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE CHURCH 35 

it helps to conserve them. This is a power both for good 
and for evil, but always for conservatism. The Church has 
a mission and duty of leadership, and it never wilKngly 
surrenders its people to any movement not controlled by 
itself. Thus, wherever the Church is ancient and identi- 
fied with the past, it is apt to be a conservative force. 

All the great national churches of Europe have opposed 
the conquering march of political democracy. They all 
execrated the French Revolution and fought its spiritual 
influences. Nothing in the history of the nineteenth cen- 
tury is more thrilling than the passionate longing of Italian 
patriots for the freedom and unity of Italy. Yet the 
ancient Church of Italy, whose secular dominion had been 
the chief obstacle to ItaHan unity, not only resisted the 
final achievement of that desire, but forty years later still 
stood aside while Italy was celebrating the jubilee of its 
union. The irrehgion so prevalent in France is in part due 
to the fact that the Church is identified in the common 
mind with opposition to democracy and fraternity. Long 
after the estabhshment of the present repubHc, the French 
bishops had to be warned by the pope to transfer their 
loyalty from the dead monarchy to the existing government. 
The recent condemnation of the Sillon was a condemnation 
of the principles of democracy.^ The Protestant State 
Churches of Germany have insisted on loyalty to the 

^ The Sillon, i.e. the Furrow, organized by an earnest and brilliant young 
Catholic, Marc Sangnier, sought to plow the atheistic soil of France for the 
sowing of religious faith by combining Catholic belief with the aspirations 
of democracy. The Church at first favored the Sillon, but soon feared it, 
and the Pope condemned it by a sensational pronouncement in 19 10. He 
said the Sillon sought to apply the principles of the philosophers of the eight- 
eenth century ''by exalting the dignity of human nature, by working in 
favor of the abolition of social inequality and of the destruction of class 
differences, and by suppressing all authority," and had sought to upset ''the . . 

historical and natural foundations of society in order to substitute for them // ,j\ 

individual autonomy, general equality, and universal brotherhood." Sang- 
nier submitted. 

i 

I 



h 



36 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

monarchy and to the reigning dynasties as an essential part 
of a Christian hf e, and set themselves both against the poUt- 
ical democracy of the first half of the nineteenth century, 
and the social democracy of the second half. The Church 
of England, too, has long been Tory in its sympathies and 
political influence. 

It is, therefore, a vital question for the social progress of 
our country what fundamental attitude the churches of 
America are Ukely to take to the forces that are striving 
to renovate our social order. 

If the American churches cover the existing order with 
the shield of their protection and call on their people in the 
name of God and religion to keep things as they are, they 
will make of the short march from Egypt to the Promised 
Land a weary forty years' pilgrimage in the desert of Sinai. 
It will take incomparably longer to get results, and the 
results will be less complete and less stable after they are 
obtained. The social engineering forces will not be dig- 
ging through loose gravel beds, but through gravel into 
which liquid cement has been poured. 

On the other hand, if our churches take the side of the 
people and back the demands for social justice and frater- 
nity in the name of Christ and the Gospel, the whole 
situation is changed. The influence of religion would 
weaken the confidence of the possessing classes in their 
own moral position. Under the pressure of social com- 
punction and sympathy Christian men who hold power 
and wealth would be disposed to make concessions in 
practical cases where they cast the decisive vote. Some 
members of the upper classes would go over to the people's 
cause with banners flying, and add a powerful intellectual, 
financial, and moral reenforcement. When Moses leaves 
the palace of Pharaoh, the chances of Israel to get out of 
Egypt are considerably improved. 

The sympathy of the churches would also hearten the 



SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE CHURCH ^ 37 

forward forces. The working classes would feel greater 
confidence in the justice of their cause, more hope in its 
triumph, and consequently greater patience in their struggle. 
Consideration for the friendship and support of the churches 
would check any inclination to headlong action and desper- 
ate methods. Their cause would be less threatened by the 
mahgn influence of violent tactics. It rests largely with 
the churches whether the emancipation of the working 
classes will come by a gradual and peaceful evolution of 
society, or whether we are to have the folly and woe of 
our Civil War over again. 

We have a demonstration close at hand what it means 
whether the Church marches with a great popular move- 
ment or stands against it. 

When our country cut loose from England and estab- 
Hshed repubHcan institutions, the really powerful rehgious 
organizations, including the Roman Cathohc, were heart 
and soul on the side of the Revolution. The memory of 
ecclesiastical oppression suffered in Great Britain, and the 
fear of Anghcan domination in America, aligned the re- 
hgious interests with the common patriotic feehng. In the 
weary struggle of the Revolutionary War the churches were 
the moral aids of the government in nerving the people to 
bring the necessary sacrifices. Their influence helped to 
secure stability for the raw institutions of the Union when 
the war was over. The American churches have always 
accepted heartily the principle of democracy on which our 
government is based and have invested it with rehgious 
sanction. They have themselves been small democracies, 
built on the same pattern as our civic institutions, and 
thereby have helped to train our people in the practice of 
self-government. 

The movement for democracy which blazed up in the 
French Revolution affected Latin America too, and be- 
tween 1 8 10 and 1825 most of the Spanish colonies gained 



38 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

their independence and established repubhcan governments. 
But here the Church was not on the side of democracy. 
The Cathohc Church had suffered deeply through the 
Revolution in Europe. It saw in the revolutionary leaders 
a spirit of unbelief and revolt against authority. It found 
its extensive property, its inherited privileges and exemp- 
tions threatened by the political changes. Its own con- 
stitution and spirit are monarchical and in sympathy with 
firm authority and reverence for inherited order. For 
these and other reasons the Church set itself against the 
modernizing influences of democracy. The conservative 
forces which exist everywhere in human society were here 
reenforced by the personal resources and institutional 
interests of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church 
became the stronghold of the reactionary elements. Con- 
sequently the history of these nations is not like the track 
of a marching army, but Kke the sands of an arena where 
powerful antagonists have circled in a long-drawn grapple. 
We are often told that the Latin peoples have less genius 
and hereditary training for self-government than we. Per- 
haps the difference in our history is at least partly due to 
the fact that our republic had the churches with it ; their 
republics had the Church against them. 

Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, had the fatal gift of 
prophecy, and long before the downfall of Troy her spirit 
was plunged in gloom as she saw from afar the flare of the 
burning city of her fathers. There are thousands of 
patriot hearts to-day heavy with similar foreboding as they 
see the opposing interests, massive and relentless, drawn 
up for the inevitable conflict. As we realize the soHdity 
and efficiency of the social forces controlled by privilege, 
we understand the immense importance of the spiritual 
awakening that is now going on in the heart of the Chris- 
tian Church. She cannot fight the battle alone, but where 
the forces are evenly matched she can decide the issue. 



SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE CHURCH 39 

Four centuries before Christ a host of Gauls plundered 
Rome and for seven months besieged the Capitol. At 
last the Romans purchased their departure. When the 
gold was being weighed in the balances, the Gallic chieftain 
Brennus threw his huge sword into the scale containing the 
weight agreed, and bade the conquered balance the iron 
with added gold. 

Once more the fate of a nation is rocking in the balance. 
Let the Church of Christ fling in, not the sword, but the 
cross, not against the weak, but for them ! 



'K 



PART II 

THE REVOLUTIONARY DESTINY OF. 
CHRISTIANITY 

CHAPTER I 

WANTED : A FAITH FOR A TASK 

A GREAT task demands a great faith. To live a great 
life a man needs a great cause to which he can surrender, 
something divinely large and engrossing for which he can 
live and, if need be, die. A great religious faith will lift 
him out of his narrow grooves and make him the inspired 
instrument of the universal will of God. It is the point 
at which the mind of man coincides with the mind of the 
Eternal. A vital faith will gradually saturate a man's 
whole life and master not only his conscious energies, but 
his subconscious drifts. The religious revolution in Paul's 
life was due to a new faith which seized him and made him 
over, and ever after he knew that a man is justified by a 
faith more than by any doings. He had made proof of 
the fact. 

Our entire generation needs a faith, for it is confronting 
the mightiest task ever undertaken consciously by any 
generation of men. Our civilization is passing through a 
great historic transition. We are at the parting of the 
ways. The final outcome may be the decay and extinc- 
tion of Western civihzation, or it may be a new epoch in 
the evolution of the race, compared with which our present 
era will seem like a modified barbarism. We now have 

40 






WANTED : A FAITH FOR A TASK 4I 

such scientific knowledge of social laws and forces, of 
economics, of history that we can intelligently mold and 
guide the evolution in which we take part. Our fathers 
cowered before the Kghtning ; we have subdued it to our 
will. Former generations were swept along more or less 
bhndly toward a hidden destiny; j we have reached the 
point where we can make history make us. Have we the 
will to match our knowledge ? Can we marshal the moral 
forces capable of breaking what must be broken, and then 
building what must be built? What spiritual hosts can 
God Kne up to rout the Devil in the battle of Armageddon ? 

Our moral efficiency depends on our religious faith. 
The force of will, of courage, of self-sacrifice liberated by a 
living rehgious faith is so incalculable, so invincible, that 
nothing is impossible when that power enters the field. 
The author of the greatest revolution in history made the 
proposition that even the slightest amount of faith is com- 
petent to do the unbelievable ; faith as tiny as a mustard 
seed can blast away mountains. 

^^ Every great revolution demands a great idea to be its 
center of action ; to furnish it with both lever and fulcrum 
for the work it has to do." ^ What great idea has the 
Christian Church which will serve as the religious lever 
and fulcrum for the engineering task of the present genera- 
tion ? What great faith has it which will inspire the re- 
ligious minds of our modern world in the regeneration of 
society ? 

The chief purpose of the Christian Church in the past] 
has been the salvation of individuals. But the most press-/ 
ing task of the present is not individualistic. Our business 
is to make over an antiquated and immoral economic 
system ; to get rid of laws, customs, maxims, and philoso- 
phies inherited from an evil and despotic past ; to create-, 
just and brotherly relations between great groups and 

1 Mazzini, "Faith and the Future," in his Essays, Camelot Edition. 



42 



CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



/ 



classes of society ; and thus to lay a social foundation on 
which modern men individually can live and work in a 
fashion that will not outrage all the better elements in 
them. Our inherited Christian faith dealt with individuals ; 
our present task deals with society. 

The Christian Church in the past has taught us to do 
our work with our eyes fixed on another world and a life 
to come. But the business before us is concerned with 
refashioning this present world, making this earth clean 
and sweet and habitable. 

' Here is the problem for all religious minds : we need a 
great faith to serve as a spiritual basis for the tremendous 
social task before us, and the working creed of our re- 
ligion, in the form in which it has come down to us, has 
none. Its theology is silent or stammers where we most 
need a ringing and dogmatic message. It has no adequate 
answer to the fundamental moral questions of our day. It 
has manifestly furnished no sufficient religious motives to 
bring the unregenerate portions of our social order under 
the control of the Christian law. Its hymns, its ritual, its 
prayers, its books of devotion, are so devoid of social thought 
that the most thrilling passions of our generation lie in 
us half stifled for lack of religious utterance. The whole 
scheme of religion which tradition has handed down to 
us was not devised for such ends as we now have in hand 
and is inadequate for them. \We need a new foundation 
for Christian thought. \ 

The straits of the churches in their present social awaken- 
ing are both interesting and pathetic. They are in the 
position of a middle-aged American in Paris suddenly 
plunged into trouble with the pohce, and feeling around in 
his mind for the French vocabulary he forgot when he was 
a sophomore. 

Twenty-five years ago the social wealth of the Bible 
was almost undiscovered to most of us. We used to plow 



wanted: a faith for a task 43 

it six inches deep for crops and never dreamed that mines 
of anthracite were hidden down below. Even Jesus talked 
like an individualist in those days and seemed to repudiate 
the social interest when we interrogated him. He said his 
kingdom was not of this world; the things of God had 
nothing to do with the things of Caesar ; the poor we would 
always have with us ; and his ministers must not be judges 
and dividers when Labor argued with Capital about the 
division of the inheritance. To-day he has resumed the 
spiritual leadership of social Christianity, of which he was 
the founder. It is a new tribute to his mastership that 
the social message of Jesus was the first great possession 
which social Christianity rediscovered. A course of lec- 
tures on the social teachings of Jesus is usually the earliest 
symptom that the social awakening has arrived. Is it 
another compHment to the undischarged force of his 
thoughts that we handle them so gingerly, as if they were 
boxed explosives? We have also worked out the social 
ideas of the Old Testament prophets. But that is about 
as far as the popular comprehension of the Bible has gone. 
We have let Paul severely alone. The Apocalypse is not 
yet printed in red, as it might be. Few commentaries show, 
any streaks of social insight. We have no literature that 
introduces the ordinary reader to the whole Bible from the 
social point of view. 

In its systematic doctrinal teaching the Church is simi- 
larly handicapped. It is trying old tools to see if they 
will fit the new job. It has done splendidly in broadening 
certain principles developed under religious individualism 
and giving them a social application. But more is needed. 

With true Christian instinct men have turned to the 
Christian law of love as the key to the situation. If we) 
all loved our neighbor, we should ^' treat him right," pa] 
him a living wage, give sixteen ounces to the pound, an( 
not charge so much for beef. But this appeal assumes that 



44 CHRISTIANIZING. TPIE SOCIAL ORDER 

we are still living in the simple personal relations of the good 
old times, and that every man can do the right thing when 
he wants to do it. But suppose a business man would be 
glad indeed to pay his young women the $12 a week which 
they need for a decent living, but all his competitors are 
paying from $7 down to $5. Shall he love himself into 
bankruptcy? In a time of industrial depression shall he 
employ men whom he does not need? And if he does, 
will his five loaves feed the five thousand unemployed that 
break his heart with their hungry eyes ? If a man owns a 
hundred shares of stock in a great corporation, how can 
his love influence its wage scale with that puny stick ? 
/The old advice of love breaks down before the hugeness of 
(modern relations. We might as well try to start a stranded 
ocean liner with the oar which poled our old dory from the 
mud banks many a time. It is indeed love that we want, 
but it is socialized love. Blessed be the love that holds 
the cup of water to thirsty lips. We can never do without 
the plain affection of man to man. But what we most 
need to-day is not the love that will break its back drawing 
water for a growing factory town from a well that was 
meant to supply a village, but a love so large and intelH- 
gent that it will persuade an ignorant people to build a 
system of waterworks up in the hills, and that will get 
after the thoughtless farmers who contaminate the brooks 
with typhoid baciUi, and after the lumber concern that is 
denuding the watershed of its forests. We want a new 
avatar of love. 

The Church has also put a new stress on the doctrine of 
stewardship, hoping to cure the hard selfishness of our 
commercial Hfe by quickening the sense of responsibihty 
in men of wealth. This also is wholly in the right direc- 
tion, but here, too, the Church is still occupying the mental 
position of the old regime. The word ^^stewardship'' itself 
comes down to us from an age of great landed proprietors. 



WANTED : A FAITH FOR A TASK 45 

It has an antique dignity that guarantees it as harmless. 
The modern equivalent would be trusteeship. But a 
trustee does not own; he merely manages. If he mis- 
manages or diverts trust funds to his own use, he is legally 
liable. If that is what we mean when we preach steward- 
ship, we should be denying the private property rights on 
which capitalism rests, and morally expropriating the 
owners. In that case we ought to see to it that this moral 
conception of property was embodied in the laws, and that 
the people would get orderly legal redress against stewards 
who have misused their trusteeship. That would mean a 
sort of Recall for business men. But in fact the Church 
puts no such cutting edge on the doctrine. It uses it to 
appeal to the conscience of powerful individuals to make 
them realize that they are accountable to God for the way 
they spend their money. The doctrine is not yet based on 
modern democratic feeling and on economic knowledge 
about the sources of modern wealth. It calls for no funda- 
mental change in economic distribution, but simply en- 
courages faithful disbursement of funds. That is not 
enough for our modern needs. 

The Golden Rule is often held up as a sufficient solution 
of the social problem. ^^If only all men would act on the 
Golden Rule !" But curiously enough men find it hard to 
act on it, even when they indorse and praise it. There 
seem to be temptations of gain or of fear in our modern 
life before which our good intentions collapse. But even 
as a standard to guide our moral intelligence the Golden 
Rule is not really adequate for our needs. It is a wonder- 
fully practical guide in all simple, personal relations. It 
appeals to our imagination to put ourselves in the other 
man's place and thus discover how we ought to treat him. 
It turns the flank of our selfishness, and compels that highly 
developed instinct in us to put itself into the service of 
love. Like the span measure of our right hand we can 



46 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

carry this rule about with us wherever we go, but it is 
hardly long enough to survey and lay out the building site 
of the New Jerusalem. Jesus probably did not intend it 
for more than an elementary method of figuring our duty. 

The Church has also revived the thought of following 
Jesus in daily conduct, living over again the life of Christ, 
and doing in all things as he would do in our place. That 
has been an exceedingly influential thought in Christian 
history. In the life of Saint Francis and his brotherhood, 
in the radical sects, and in single radiant lives it has pro- 
duced social forces of immense power. In our own time 
the books of Mr. Charles M. Sheldon have set it forth with 
winning spirit, and we have seen thousands of young people 
trying for a week to live as Jesus would. But it is so high 
a law that only consecrated individuals can follow it per- 
manently and intelligently, and even they may submit to 
it only in the high tide of their spiritual life. To most 
men the demand to live as Jesus would, is mainly useful 
to bring home the fact that it is hard to live a Christlike 
life in a mammonistic society. It convicts our social order 
of sin, but it does not reconstruct it. 

These are all truly religious ideas, drawn from the 
teaching of Jesus himself, and very effective in sweetening 
and ennobling our personal relations. But they set up no 
ideal of human society, demand no transformation of social 
institutions, create no collective enthusiasms, and furnish 
no doctrinal basis for a public morality. They have not 
grown antiquated, and never will. But every step in the 
evolution of modern society makes them less adequate for 
its religious needs. The fact that the Church is leaning so 
hard on them at present shows how earnestly it is trying 
to meet the present need, and also how scanty is the equip- 
ment with which it confronts the new social task. 

So we return to the question : What is the religious 
basis for the task of Christianizing and regenerating the 



wanted: a faith for a task 47 

social order ? Suppose that a Christian man feels a throb- 
bing compassion and fellow-feeling for the people, and a 
holy anger against the institutionalized wrong that is 
stunting and brutalizing their Hves, converting the chil- 
dren of God into slaves of Mammon. Suppose that he 
feels this so strongly that he hardly cares what becomes of 
his own soul if only he can help his nation and race. Sup- 
pose that a whole generation is coming vaguely to feel that 
way. What great word of faith does historic Christianity 
offer to express and hallow and quicken this spiritual 
passion which is so evidently begotten of the spirit of 
Christ? Must he go to materialistic Socialism to find a 
dogmatic faith large enough to house him, and intellectual 
food nutritious enough to feed his hunger ? Thousands have 
left the Church and have gone to Socialism, not to shake 
off a faith, but to get a faith. 

I raise this challenge because I believe Christianity can 
meet it. My purpose is not critical, but wholly con- 
structive. If I did not believe in the vitaKty and adap- 
tabihty of the Christian faith, I should sit down with Job 
on the ashes and keep silence. 

But let no one take the challenge Kghtly. It points to no 
superficial flaw in the working machinery of the Church, 
but to the failure of our religious ideas to connect with 
our religious needs, and that is fundamental. Religion, 
to have power over an age, m.ust satisfy the highest moral 
and rehgious desires of that age. If it lags behind, and 
presents outgrown conceptions of hfe and duty, it is no 
longer in the full sense the Gospel. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 

The Christian religion, in the form in which our fore- 
fathers transmitted it to this modern world, was strong in 
creating a conviction of personal sin, an assurance of 'per- 
sonal forgiveness and adoption, and a firm hope of personal 
immortality, but it was weak in social hopes and aims. In 
the relations of man to man, and in the relation of man to 
his own soul, Christianity was the salt of the earth, the 
great antiseptic against vice and passion, the spur to jus- 
tice, the motive of neighborly kindness, and the comfort 
of the poor and helpless. But it furnished no really effec- 
tive religious conception of redemption for the organic life 
of human society. ^It presented no working program 
by which the social institutions might be transformed in 
accordance with the will of God and the mind of Christ. 
The creation of a distinctively Christian social order was 
not what Christianity was commonly supposed to stand 
for. Those who did stand for it were men apart. Ortho- 
dox theology hardly . considered the Christianizing of the 
social order as part of the scheme of redemption. The 
pulpit rarely proclaimed it. The hymns of the Church 
did not give voice to the desire for it. Its liturgies did not 
direct the power of united prayer toward its achievement. 

When Christianity was in its infancy, there were diverse 
expectations about its future, but it is safe to say that few 
would have expected this charge to be raised against it. 
It was born of revolutionary lineage. Its cradle was 
rocked by the storm wind of popular hopes. What was it 

48 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 49 

that brought the multitudes to the Jordan to hear John 
and that thrilled the throngs that followed Jesus about in 
GaKlee ? Was it the desire to go to heaven one by one . 
when they died? What inspired the early disciples and 
lent wings to the Gospel? It was the hope of a great 
common salvation for all the people, the beUef that thej 
Kingdom of God on earth was at last in sight. 

Christianity was pure and unperverted when it Kved as 
a divine reaHty in the heart of Jesus Christ. But in his 
mind its purpose was summed up in one great word : the 
Reign of God. To this he dedicated himself in baptism. 
This set him the problems which he faced in the wilderness 
temptations. This was the center of his parables and 
prophecies. This explains the ethical standards which he 
set up in the sermon on the mount. It was the Reign of 
God' on earth for which he consumed his strength, for which 
he died, and for which he promised to return. 

The Kingdom of God is the first and the most essential 
dogma of the Christian faith. It is also the lost social 
ideal of Christendom. No man is a Christian in the full 
sense of the original discipleship until he has made the 
Kingdom of God the controlling purpose of his Hfe, and no 
man is intellectually prepared to understand Jesus Christ 
until he has understood the meaning of the Kingdom of 
God. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a 
revival of PauHne theology. The present-day Reformation 
is a revival of the spirit and aims of Jesus himself. 

When we undertake to restate the conception of the 
Kingdom of God precisely as it Kved in the mind of Jesus, 
we are beset by a hundred difficulties of criticism and inter- 
pretation which only the speciaKst can estimate. For- 
tunately most of them are academic, interesting to the 
scholar, but of sHght importance for the practical and 
modern questions with which we are here concerned. By 
far the greatest hindrance to a right understanding of the 



50 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

essential purpose of Christ is the ecclesiastical and theo- 
logical conception of him which eighteen centuries have 
superimposed on the historical records of his life and 
teachings. That acts as a refracting and distorting medium 
of vision, and until a man has to some degree cleared that 
away and learned to read the gospels as they stand, he is 
not Hkely to comprehend the social significance of Jesus 
and of the gospel of the Kingdom of God. 

The safest and surest way of understanding the faith of 
Jesus is to understand the faith of his people.^ He did 
not invent his idea of the Kingdom, but received it as a 
heritage from the past of his nation. If it had been a 
new invention, it could not have exerted such prompt and 
widespread power when he proclaimed it. New moral 
and rehgious conceptions usually get little intelHgent re- 
sponse at first. They have to ferment in the common 
mind for at least one generation before they can move the 
masses. Jesus felt no need of defining or explaining the 
idea of the Kingdom ; he simply announced that it was at 
last on the point of realization, and the people understood. 
The idea was a common spiritual possession of the Jewish 
people, just as belief in democracy is an axiom in the com- 
mon thought of America. 

The hope of the Kingdom of God had been wrought into 
the tissue of Jewish thought by the Hebrew prophets. 
They had quickened the whole nation to an attitude of 
expectancy and hopeful erectness. In other nations re- 
ligion consisted mainly in faithful adherence to ancient 
customs. It turned its face backward. In Israel the 
prophets had been a driving force which put religion and 
morality on the march to the future. This was a wonder- 
ful spiritual achievement. We still feel the impact of their 
power. In reading them I feel awed by the presence of 

^ In " Christianity and the Social Crisis," Chapter I, I have discussed the 
Hebrew prophets more fully. 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 51 

the living God, as when Moses saw the thorn bush ablaze. 
These men were so alive to God and felt his righteousness 
so overpoweringly that they beat their naked hands against 
jagged injustice and inhumanity. They were centers of 
rehgious unrest, creators of a divine dissatisfaction, and the 
unsparing critics of all who oppressed and corrupted the 
people. 

The prophets were rehgious reformers demanding social 
action. They were not discussing holiness in the abstract, 
but dealt with concrete, present-day situations in the life 
of the people which were sometimes due to the faults of 
the people themselves, but usually to the sins of the ruling 
classes. They demanded neighborly good will and humane 
care of the helpless. But their most persistent and cate- 
gorical demand was that the men in power should quit 
their extortion and judicial graft. They were trying to 
beat back the hand of tyranny from the throat of the 
people. Since the evil against which they protested was 
poKtical, their method of redress was political too. Their 
rehgion did not displace politics, but reenforced it. If any 
modern preacher had told them to disentangle their re- 
hgion and their politics and keep them in separate compart- 
ments, they would not have known what he meant. 

They all had a radiant hope of a future when their social 
and religious ideals would be realized. Emancipation from 
foreign tyranny, peace and order throughout the land, just 
and humane rulers, fertility of the soil, prosperity for all, 
a glorious capital city with a splendid temple in it — it 
was the social Utopia of an agrarian nation. Hardly an 
ingredient of human hfe is missing in their ideals, except 
the hope of immortality. In the prophets before the 
Exile there is har^^ a side-long glance at life after death. 
With men so rehgious their hope was rehgious to the core, 
as a matter of course. God himself was to be the great 
mover of events. The more their moral demands were 



52 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

bafHed by brutal power, the more they threw their hope 
back on God for fulfillment. He himself would make bare 
his holy arm and put down his enemies, cleanse the nation 
in a day of judgment, pour out his spirit to create new 
moral forces, and write his law — not on stone, but in 
the living hearts of men as a new national constitution. 

This reign of God for which they hoped was therefore a 
social hope on fire with religion. Their concern was for 
the largest and noblest social group with which they were 
in contact, — their nation. In all their discussions they 
take the social solidarity and collective personality of their 
nation for granted. They sought to knit their country- 
men together in the bonds of a social order based on divine 
rights and sanctions. iThey were men and dealt with men, 
but they focused not souls, but society. They called their 
coming age the Reign of Jehovah ; but his reign, when set 
over against the power of the oppressors, meant the eman- 
cipation of the people. To speak frankly, the prophets 
were revolutionists. If they appeared in Russia to-day, 
they would get short shrift. Some of them set their hope 
on the invasion of a foreign power Hke Assyria, which was 
to serve as an instrument in God's hands to break the 
existing social order to pieces and clear the way for a new 
order to be organized by ^^the remnant" of the plain and 
righteous people. How the writings of these radicals ever 
came to be treasured as the sacred literature of their nation 
is one of the mysteries of history. Other nations would 
have killed the men and destroyed every vestige of their 
writings. But now that the social wrongs against which 
they protested are long dead, we can Hsten to them im- 
partially, and we rightly feel that these men were inspired 
by the living God, and were everlastingly right in smiting 
wrong as they did. 

It is a mistake to assume that the Kingdom of God 
meant the same thing to all the prophets. They were 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 53 

generations apart. Each stood within his own historical 
situation, and each saw the future from his own angle of 
vision. They differed in spiritual purity and elevation just 
as modern rehgious leaders differ, and each saw the King- 
dom of God as he had it in him to see it. The ideal has a 
different smile of beauty for every worshiper, but to each 
it means the fairest and sweetest that he knows. 

Moreover, since the ideal of the Kingdom of God was a 
social possession of the nation, it rose and declined with 
the outward condition and the inner spirit of the whole 
people. When the nation lost its independence, its home, 
its neighborhood life and social coherence in the great 
Exile, its national hope gained in passion, but lost in sanity. 
It had to grow in the dark and it changed, as if a flower of 
the noon were transformed into a night-blooming cereus 
of mystic fragrance* The prophets before the Exile stood 
with both feet on the realities of national life. They ex- 
pected the reign of Jehovah to come by an act of God, 
but to connect with present conditions and grow out of 
them. The patriots of the Exile felt that only a miraculous 
intervention could bridge the chasm between the present 
misery and the future splendor, and they leaned back with 
a kind of passive ardor to wait for God's vengeance on their 
oppressor^. All their optimism was projected far into the 
future. The present era of the world seemed so embedded 
in evil, that only the hand of God could break it up and 
create the new era. Sitting in enforced helplessness, his- 
tory seemed to them like a predetermined scheme. The 
great change was all fixed in advance by the divine counsels, 
like the opening of a bank vault by a time clock, and they 
bent their devout ingenuity to puzzle out the combination 
of the divine mechanism in advance. 

A still more decisive change came about at the same 
time as a consequence of the contact of the Jews with the 
great Babylonian and Persian monarchies and the Persian 



54 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

religion. Their horizon was widened by it. The national 
judgment enlarged into a world judgment; the national 
salvation into a cosmic renewal; the Messiah of the 
Davidic line into a heavenly deliverer. We are familiar 
with the fact that in the first century of our era the Jewish 
faith mingled with Greek religious philosophy in Alexandria 
and other centers and created a syncretistic religion of. 
which Philo is the conspicuous example. A similar mixture 
apparently took place when the Jewish communities mingled 
with the life of the Eastern empire. Persian dualism deeply 
affected later Judaism. In the Old . Testament there is 
hardly a glimpse of a Satan and of evil angels. After the 
Exile, a great hierarchy of darkness was the counterpart of 
God ajid the angelic hosts in popular Jewish thought. 
These new ideas connected with politics. It was clear now 
why heathen powers were able to hold Israel down. De- 
monic forces lurked behind them and would have to be 
overthrown if the Kingdom of God was to be set up. It 
was no longer a plain human fight against bloody wrong, 
but a supernal contest against spiritual principaKties and 
powers. Against that black and Titanic background the 
old hope of the reign of God stood out with high lights 
and lurid colors. 

Under these influences the prophetic hope was worked 
over into the scheme of what is called apocalypticism, and 
embodied in a prolific literature. The apocalyptic scheme 
was not a product of pure Hebrew thought, but an exotic 
growth. In fact, its dualism and transcendentalism were 
a radical departure from Hebrew religion. Apocalyptic 
ideas are to-day one of the special marks of the most con- 
servative biblical school; at that time they were a ^^new 
theology'' of questionable paternity. 

Even in this debased condition the hope of the King- 
dom was still a great religious conception, a brave faith 
holding on tenaciously in an age of gloom. But its in- 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 55 

fluence was full of danger. Those who drank the cup of 
apocalypticism henceforth moved in a world of unreahties, 
always expecting what never happened, and ^^ followed 
wandering fires, lost in a quagmire." The flame of fanati- 
cism which flared up in the Jewish War and in the later 
revolts against Rome was fed by the fuel of these ideas-. 

Apocalypticism is of more than academic interest, for it 
is still a living force. It passed from contemporary Judaism 
into primitive Christianity. Jewish apocalyptic books were 
turned into Christian writings by slight changes or addi- 
tions, and constituted a considerable portion of the early 
floating Christian literature. Two apocalyptic books of 
great beauty and power, which we should never want to 
lose, were embodied in the Old and New Testament canon : 
the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse of John. Since it 
was an axiom of biblical interpretation that all the sacred 
writings were equal in value and without any contradic- 
tion in their contents, it was assumed that all the prophetic 
writings in the Bible meant what these two books mean. 
Apocalypticism had the great advantage over prophetism 
that it was more coherent and systematic. It presented a 
theology and a philosophy of history. So the apocalyptic 
thought-world spread from these two books to all the 
prophetic sections of the Bible and obscured the thought 
of the prophets beneath their brilliant colors. 

So apocalypticism came to dominate the Christian view 
of future history. Whenever men looked down the future 
to gain a religious outlook, they saw it in the artificial lay 
out of apocalyptic dualism and determinism. The apoca- 
lyptic hope has always contained ingredients of religious 
force and value, but its trail through history is strange 
and troubled reading. It has been of absorbing fascina- 
tion to some Christian minds, but it has led them into 
labyrinths from which some never emerged. It has been 
the inspiration of earnest Christian men in some lines of 



56 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Christian activity, but it has effectively blocked their 
minds with strange prejudices against other important Hnes 
of work. It has turned the enthusiasm of great historical 
movements into injurious fanaticism. It has spawned 
hopeless httle sects. It has been one chief cause why the 
Kingdom hope has not gained the wide practical effective- 
ness which it might have, for in this debased and irrational 
form it is hopelessly foreign to modern life and thought. 
I know that this charge will pain some devout Christian 
minds whom I would not willingly hurt, but in the interest 
of the very hope for which they stand I have to say that 
the idea of the Kingdom of God must slough off supocalyp- 
ticism if it is to become the religious property of the modern 
world. Those who hold it must cease to put their hope 
in salvation by catastrophe and learn to recognize and 
apply the law of development in human Hfe. They must 
outgrow the diaboHsm and demonism with which Judaism 
was infected in Persia and face the stern facts of racial sin. 
They must break with the artificial schemes and the deter- 
minism of an unhistorical age and use modern resources to 
understand the way God works out retribution and salva- 
tion in human affairs.^ 

We have our warrant for modernizing and purifying the 
inherited conceptions of the Kingdom from Jesus himself.^ 
He did not deal with men whose minds were a blank on 
the Messianic future, but with people who held a mass of 
variegated hopes and expectations and demanded of him 
that he should fulfill them. The true way of understand- 

^ The Rev. I. M. Haldeman has reviewed my book, " Christianity and the 
Social Crisis, " in a booklet published by C. C. Cook, New York, which I 
should like to commend to the attention of all who are interested in the sub- 
ject. It is an emphatic condemnation of my positions and an uncompromis- 
ing statement of the apocalyptic scheme and spirit in all its dogmatic assur- 
ance and artificiality. If any one will read the book and the pamphlet side 
by side, he will face two kinds of Christianity and can make his choice. 

2 For a fuller discussion of the teachings of Jesus, see "Christianity and 
the Social Crisis," Chapter II. 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 57 

ing him is to watch him as he makes his way through this 
popular thought, accepting, rejecting, correcting, elevat- 
ing, enlarging, and hallowing. Every true leader of hu- 
manity has exerted his power in that method. He must 
take the right impulses and convictions already existing 
among the people and weld them into a mightier unity. 
At the same time he must resist and cut under the mis- 
leading and draining ideas and tendencies with which the 
truth is mixed up. So Jesus accepted the faith in the 
Kingdom of God which his prophetic forerunners held out 
to him from the past with unseen hands, and made it the 
holy content and purpose of his own life. Therewith he 
gave his full indorsement to the social hope which is an 
essential part of the Kingdom idea. On the other hand, 
he accepted it, not as a slave, but as a son, and refashioned 
it with sovereign freedom. Some of its ingredients that 
were dearest to the popular heart offended his ethical and 
religious spirit, and he set himself with forethought to 
oppose them. These corrections, therefore, embody his 
most distinctive contributions to the Kingdom ideal. On 
these points we are sure that we have pure Christian thought 
and not inherited Judaism. On the other hand, when he 
lays a corrective emphasis, for instance, on individuality 
and spirituahty, we n>ust not forget that this is balanced 
by his tacit acceptance of the main idea which he held in 
common with the people as a matter of course. 

The points at which Jesus consciously opposed the cur- 
rent conceptions set up the landmarks of a distinctively 
Christian ideal of the Kingdom, and I shall attempt to 
enumerate them. In reading the Gospels from this point 
of view, we ought to temember, however, that he must 
have worked out a clear comprehension of these differences 
gradually. All original minds begin with the stock of 
ideas common to their social environment and work away 
from that toward their own formulation of truth as they 



58 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

find themselves. However great the divine ingredient in 
Christ's nature was, it did not exempt him from the law of 
growth. As a boy he ^^ advanced in wisdom and statur^/ 
that is, in physical and intellectual maturity. Did that 
process stop when he was thirty years old ? Or was it 
accelerated and intensified when he entered on his public 
activity? A ready-made Christ who had no need of ex- 
panding and trying out his ideas by experience and action 
would have had no genuine human nature, and it is plain 
heresy to believe in such. In fact, in the desert temptations 
we see him in absorbed and concentrated thought in view 
of the problems he was to meet. We therefore put the 
problem faultily when we ask : What did Jesus think ? 
We ought to ask : In what direction were his thoughts 
working ? We want the line of his movement if we are to 
follow him. His life was cut short in early manhood. 
John says that at the end Jesus spoke of thoughts which 
had to remain unuttered, and expressed the hope that the 
Spirit of God would work on his sayings which lay like 
germs in their minds, and make them grow.^ If we want 
to be faithful to his spirit, therefore, we shall not only have 
to trace the line along which he moved, but even prolong 
it beyond the point marked in his recorded teaching. 

I. The universal expectation of his people was that the 
Messiah would hoist the flag of revolt and slay the oppres- 
sors either by the breath of his mouth or by the sword of 
the faithful. Force was apparently the only means by 
which the tyranny of -the present could be overthrown and 
the Messianic kingdom set up. Yet Jesus repudiated the 
force revolution from the first. To set up the reign of 
peace by bloodshed was to accept the kingdoms of the 
world from the hands of the devil. When his popularity 
in Galilee was at its height, thousands of pilgrims on their 
way to the festival at Jerusalem gathered around him on 

1 John xvi. 12-14. 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 59 

the desert shore of the Lake and tried to make him king 
by force. It was the psychological moment, but he escaped 
under cover of the darkness. When they followed him 
next day, he drenched their fires. ^ During the last days 
at Jerusalem his power over the people was still such that 
the Sanhedrin felt that the peace and security of the State 
were at his mercy.^ They assumed as a matter of course 
that the revolution was his aim, but he never hfted the 
hand that would have summoned it. He even refused 
the aid of celestial force.^ When we consider how abjectly 
kings and statesmen have reHed on force to maintain their 
hold, and how persistently the suggestion of a propaganda 
of violence has thrust itself on the leaders of popular move- 
ments, we can realize what moral firmness and purity of 
motive is impKed in this steadfast refusal to fight evil with 
evil. He committed himself to death and his cause to 
apparent failure rather than let the red devil of bloodshed 
loose.'* This was not timidity nor squeamishness, but a 
sagacity centuries ahead of his time. Violence calls out 
violence. ^'They that take the sword shall perish by the 
sword.'' ^ Evil is not permanently lessened by counter- 
evil. This must be one of the differentiating marks of 
those who seek social salvation under the leadership of 
Jesus : to refuse violent m_eans, however tempting, and to 
throw all fighting ardor into moral protest. 

2. To the Jews the Kingdom of God meant the triumph 
of Judaism. The kings of the world would become tribu- 
tary to the Jewish empire. The capital of the world would 
be shifted from Rome to Jerusalem. To have full share in 
the Messianic salvation a Gentile must become a Jew. 
When Gentiles claimed equal rights in the Christian 
churches, it came with a shock to the Christian Jews, and 
some could never bring themselves to assent to it. Prob- 

^ John vi. 2 John, xi. 47-48. ^ Matt. xxvi. 47-56. 

* John xviii. 36. ^ Matt. xxvi. 52. 



6o CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

ably Jesus began with the same horizon as his country- 
men, but every time he met a Gentile or Samaritan we can 
see his horizon in the act of expanding. His heart was so 
utterly human that when he felt the touch of a Gentile 
hand, he seized the hand of a man and a brother. In the 
joy of that discovery he denied the Jewish claim to special 
privilege, and reversed the order of merit. He said he had 
never found such faith among Jews as in that Roman captain, 
and predicted that heathen would come from the ends of 
the earth to sit with the Hebrew patriarchs, while their sons 
were left in the dark outside. He went out of his way to set 
a Samaritan up as a model of humane kindness above the 
priest and the Levite. That was sand in the mouth of his 
countrymen, just as if an American orator should tell an 
Illinois crowd of the superior virtues of the ^^Dago" and 
the ^^Hunk," or an Alabama crowd of the brotherhood of 
a negro. In Jesus we encounter the spirit that beats down 
the trammels of a narrow group to seek a wider allegiance ; 
that reaches out beyond jingo patriotism toward the 
brotherhood of nations ; that smites race pride and preju- 
dice in the face in the name of humanity ; and that refuses 
to accept even from religion any obligation to hold our- 
selves apart from our fellows. That determined breadth 
of brotherhood is another permanent landmark of the 
Kingdom ideal as Jesus expressed it. 

3. The idea of the Kingdom of God was filled with demo- 
cratic spirit, but it had come down from despotic times 
and was cast in monarchical forms. The Messiah was ex- 
pected as a king, and his followers hoped to rule as his 
courtiers. Jesus flatly contradicted such. expectations and 
laid down the law of service as the fundamental law of his 
kingdom.^ He himself had not come to be served, but to 
serve to the death, and all greatness in the Kingdom would 
have to rest on the same basis. Modern democracy is 

^ Matt. XX. 20-28. 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 6 1 

destined to establish the same principle and to aboHsh all 
lordships that cannot show their title on that basis. The 
Jewish conception of God himself was cast in the mold 
furnished by human despotisms. When Jesus spoke of 
God as our Father, he democratized God himself. That 
substituted happy obedience for the old slavish fear, and 
free cooperation between man and God for the Jewish 
mercantile contract ideas. By raising the value of the 
human soul and its life on the one side, and by bringing 
God down close to us as our Father, he laid the religious 
foundation for modern democracy and anticipated the 
craving of the modern spirit. We to-day conceive of the 
Reign of God as the Commonwealth of God and Man. 

4. To all devout Jews the Mosaic and Rabbinic Law was 
at the core of reHgion, much as ''the Church" is to pious 
Catholics. Consequently the Kingdom of God did not 
mean the abolition of the Law, but its enthronement. The 
Kingdom would come when the people obeyed the Law; 
and when the Kingdom came, the Law would be obeyed 
completely. It was the hope of the Kingdom that made the 
Pharisee so punctilious and rigid. Jesus, on the other hand, 
was so indifferent to the ceremonial laws that he struck the 
earnest religionists of his day as a man of loose life and of 
destructive influence.^ All his enthusiasm went out 
toward justice, mercy, and good will among men. In that 
respect he revived and surpassed the spirit of the great 
Hebrew prophets. In the synagogue at Nazareth he set 
forth the program of the Kingdom from Isaiah; it 
meant glad news to the poor, release to the captives, sight 
to the blind, and liberty to the bruised and crushed Hves.^ 
When John doubted his Messiahship he pointed as proof of 
it to the fact that human life was being relieved and re- 
stored, and that the poor had good news proclaimed to them.^ 
. . . All these are phrases of emancipation. In his 

^ Matt. xi. 16-19 J V. 17. 2 Luke iv. 16-21. ^ Matt. xi. 2-6. 



62 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

wonderful picture of the Messianic judgment there is not a 
word about sacrifices, prayers, fasting, food laws, or puri- 
fications.^ The Messiah's mete wand is social sympathy. 
Some have felt the hunger and sickness and loneliness of 
their fellows ; some have not. That alone decides on their 
fitness for the kingdom of brotherhood. The mercy which 
Jesus demands here is not the dole of charity, but the sense 
of solidarity which makes all human life part of our life. 
He asserts that solidarity for himself by holding that 
whatever is done to the weakest member of humanity is 
done to himself. All ethical obligation gets new force and 
clearness when that oneness is accepted. In this indif- 
ference to ceremonial religion and this insistence on human 
.solidarity and its ethical corollaries, he parted company 
with the ecclesiasticism of his day and of all days and trans- 
ferred the Kingdom ideal to the plane of ethics inspired 
by the spirit of God. This is another line of orientation 
for all who seek the Kingdom of God as real disciples of 
Jesus. 

5. To the great mass of men then and now material 
plenty and comfort were the real substance of any good 
time coming. Religious obedience was the price they must 
pay to get on the inside. Economic wealth was the end; 
morality and religion the means. Jesus never despised the 
physical needs of men. Surely he who spent his strength 
in healing the sick; who remembered the hunger of the 
multitude ; whose first thought for the daughter of Jairus 
was that the little girl ought to have something to eat; 
who took pride in the fact that his disciples had never 
lacked for anything while they were with him ; and who put 
a prayer for the daily bread in the central place amid the 
brevity of the Lord's Prayer, — was too human and too wise 
to belittle the physical foundations of human life. But to 
him eating and drinking were not the end of life. All our 

^ Matt. XXV. 31-46. 



THE SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS 63 

hurry and worry that runs after still more property, still 
more dress, still another automobile, still more sumptuous 
meals, would seem to Jesus pitiable heathenism and starva- 
tion of the God in us. ^'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God 
and the righteousness of God, and these things will follow.'' ^ 
For overfed men to preach simpKcity of Hving to the under- 
fed is abominable cant. But for the overfed to preach it to 
themselves is salvation. We are wholly right in demanding 
a juster and more equal distribution of economic possessions 
as the A B C of a better social order, but the real good that 
we are after is not the dollars and cents, but the satisfaction 
of our craving for justice, the sweep of human fellowship 
made possible by greater financial equality, the gladness 
of unhindered brotherhood and humanity. Our mothers 
were just as happy and quite as noble on ingrain carpet 
as our daughters on Axminster. The great philosophy 
and music of Germany were dreamed out on very humble 
fare. Thousands of Americans every summer plunge back 
into the wilderness with a sigh of rehef to sleep on the 
ground and scrape frying pans for themselves, and un- 
counted thousands would like to if only they could. When 
they revert to simplicity and live like brothers with their 
guides and friends, they feel that they have a soul and a 
God. The sociaHsts are right in emphasizing the economic 
basis of human society ; but Jesus is also right in empha- 
sizing its spiritual ends. To exploit no man and to love 
all men, to be at peace with your brothers and with your- 
self and with your God, to sing with joy at sight of a sunset 
or an autumn creeper or a happy child, to prize truth and 
knowledge, to turn effortless from thought to adoration, and 
to enjoy prayer as the highest exercise of life, — this is the 
real thing; the rest is scaffolding. The followers of Jesus 
should lead all others in protesting against the Dives- 
and-Lazarus plan of the social order, but not chiefly because 

^ Matt. vi. 19-34. 



64 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Lazarus fell short of the normal number of ounces of 
crumbs, but because they were crumbs and were thrown to 
him as a dole. A cheese sandwich and an apple make a 
fair meal if Fletcherized properly, but of equality and free- 
dom we want unlimited rations. Men fear that the 
amount of goods produced will diminish if sociaHsm should 
displace the present driving methods of industry. As 
Christian men we should consider' that a slight evil, pro- 
vided it would purchase social equality and allow us to be 
brothers to our present superiors or inferiors. This is another 
mark of the distinctively Christian conception of the King- 
dom of God, that the spiritual values of human life are set 
above all economic aids to Hfe as the real end to be sought. 
6. The popular expectation reveled in luscious descrip- 
tions of the Messianic age. In the teachings of Jesus there 
is a marked absence of Utopian details, and a marked 
insistence on present duty. Jesus is the eternal model for 
the combination of enthusiasm and sanity. The people 
expected the Messianic revolution to happen with magic 
suddenness. Jesus in the wilderness temptation decHned 
to set off the fireworks by a miraculous leap from the 
temple pinnacle. He simply began among his friends 
and let the thing work its way. Probably at the outset 
he too expected a mass movement and a swift culmination, 
but as he tried it out, he reaHzed that this was a matter of 
slow and patient preparation. The little dogmatist pro- 
claims the invulnerabihty of his theory long after Humpty 
Dumpty has fallen from the hard wall of fact. The great 
minds always bow to the superior sanctity of reality. Jesus 
proved his sonship by his teachableness. The parables 
in which he describes the Kingdom of God as an organic 
growth slowly making its way against hindrances and com- 
ing to maturity in its own time were the ripe result of his 
Okwn observation. These parables clearly express a con- 
scious departure from the current ideas and a cautious 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL 8 1 

forces that were to revolutionize the world first gathered 
headway. 

Yet even within its own organization the Church fell 
far short of Hving up to the principles of the Kingdom of 
God. It became a close replica of the Roman Empire 
within which its organization had been molded. The 
popes did their best to copy the Caesars whose throne they 
inherited. The early democracy of the Church passed first 
into an oligarchy, and then into a monarchy, and its 
official heads took no interest in breeding the spirit of lib- 
erty in the people. It is significant that as the laity were 
suppressed by the clergy, the millennial hope was silenced. 
^^The millennial hope receded step by step in the measure 
in which philosophical theology advanced and in which 
the laity passed under the domination of the clergy. The 
people were deprived of the religion - which they could 
understand and furnished with a belief which they could 
not understand ; or else the old faith and the old hopes 
faded of themselves and were superseded by the authority 
of a mysterious cfeed. In that respect the extermination or 
the fading of millennialism is perhaps the most momentous 
fact in the history of Eastern Christianity." ^ 

To sum up, the long ecKpse of the social ideal was due 
to a combination of various causes. The decline of the 
Jewish influence deprived it of the energy which centuries 
of preparation had given it in Judaism. Its apocalyptic 
form made it unreal and unpractical. Speculative the- 
ology crowded out the social ideas by a wholly different 
and apparently more ^^ spiritual" set of conceptions. The 
hope of heaven absorbed the religious fervor which might 
have reached out for a better life on earth. The organized 
Church absorbed the constructive ability of Christian men, 
concentrated their social interest on the work done through 
the Church, and depreciated the religious value of the social 

^ Harnack, "History of Dogma," VoL II, pp. 294-300. 
G 



82 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

order outside of the Church. The dedine of democracy 
within the Church weakened the rehgious force of demo- 
cratic and social aspirations. 

The great purpose of Jesus, the reign of God among men 
on earth, has shared the experience of Jesus himself. Its 
history has been a long Via Dolorosa. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REBIRTH OP THE SOCIAL HOPE 

To-day the social ideal of Christianity has almost 
emerged from its eclipse and is becoming once more the 
great working dogma of our faith. 

Its emergence began with the dawn of modern democ- 
racy. As soon as the common people came to a collective 
self-consciousness and understood their own instincts and 
needs, they struck out for a social realization of the Christian 
faith. 

Beginning with the twelfth century, a series of remarkable 
religious movements ran through the countries of Western 
Europe, differing widely in their local aims and doctrinal 
coloring, but with a strange unanimity of spirit and purpose. 
Some, Hke the Franciscan movement, were protected and 
perverted by the Church; others, Hke that of the Wal- 
denses, the Lollards, the Taborites, and the Anabaptists, 
were condemned and persecuted by it. We are accus- 
tomed to speak of the latter group as evangelical sects, and 
to interpret them as forerunners of the Protestant Reforma- 
tion. It is much closer to historical truth to say that they 
were the first stirrings of Christian democracy, expressions 
of lay religion and working-class ethics. They heralded 
the religious awakening of the common people and their 
cry for the Reign of God on earth. 

These movements combined an ardent hope of a better 
age with a searching condemnation of the existing social 
order. They were all inspired by millennial hopes. Apoc- 
alypticism revived and got a new meaning from contem- 

^3 



84 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

porary events. There was to be a new era, a great judg- 
ment on the Church, a golden age for all the world. The 
enthusiasm for poverty which characterized these radical 
movements before the Reformation and which seems strange 
to us, gets its real significance as a religious protest against 
social iniquity. The great institutions of the Church had 
accumulated enormous landed wealth, and were fat with 
rents and profits. The higher clergy had secured special 
privileges, exemptions, and governmental powers, till they 
were brazen with despotic spirit. The vow of poverty 
which every monk took had in many cases become a mere 
sham, for it admitted him to membership in a wealthy mo- 
nastic corporation and enabled him to live in idleness on the 
labor of others. When Saint Francis of Assisi wedded the 
Lady Poverty and refused property for his order as well as 
for the individual monk, he tried to make* parasitic wealth 
and power impossible for himself and his friends. This 
most famous and beloved saint of the Middle Ages was 
the great friend and ideal of the common people, a very 
incarnation of Christian democracy. In its infancy, before 
the Church twisted it and wrested it to its own taste and use, 
the Franciscan movement was charged with an almost 
revolutionary social sympathy.^ The Waldensian move- 
ment, originating a few years before, was animated by a 
similar spirit. These men washed their hands of rent and 
profit, and went to share the life of the people. They 
headed a social and rehgious quest for simplicity, sincerity, 
honesty, and fraternity. In some of these movements 
none was allowed to hold a government office, because he 
would thereby become a tool of cruelty and judicial murder 
and torture. They all held the communistic ideals about 
property. Wherever voluntary poverty was not the out- 
come of an ascetic desire for heaven, but an expression of 

1 Sabatier's "Life of St. Francis " is still the classical interpretation of that 
wonderful soul. 



THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL HOPE 85 

democratic spirit, it stood for the strongest possible con- 
demnation of a selfish and exploiting social order and for 
an heroic effort to live a truly human and fraternal hfe. 
Some bold reformatory spirits, like Arnold of Brescia and 
John Wiclif, could see no salvation for the entire Church 
till it ceased to be an exploiter, surrendered its wealth, 
and adopted the Christian law of simplicity and service. 

The fact that these movements were chiefly concerned 
for the reform of the Church must not blind us to their 
social significance. The Church is always part of the 
social order, and in that age it was relatively a far larger 
part of it than now. It was inextricably tangled up with 
all the rest of the governing powers. With true instinct 
the re-awakened democracy turned its forces first on the 
redemption of the Church. The fact that the Church, 
the body of Christ, had been seized by the forces that 
oppressed and exploited the people was the crying shame 
of the times, more keenly felt than any other horror. All 
felt that the first step in the creation of a righteous social 
order was the emancipation of the organized conscience of 
Christendom. If Christ had a voice once more, all the rest 
would follow. The course of history in the last four hun- 

I dred years has proved the correctness of that instinct. 
The Church was really the strategic key to the emancipa- 
tion of the people. 

I The great battle of the Protestant Reformation did not 

turn on the establishment of the Kingdom of God on 
earth, but on the question how a man could be justified 
before God and save his soul now and hereafter. The 
theology of the Reformation was not modeled on the 
teachings of Jesus, in which the Kingdom is central, but 
on the doctrinal system of Paul. It was a discussion of 
old Catholic problems from new points of view. Some of 
the minor radical parties did indeed make the ethical and 
religious teac.iings of Jesus fundamental and revived the 



86 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

hope of an earthly reign of Christ, but so far as the great 
Reformers are concerned, the social hope was still under 
eclipse. The exegetical conscience of Protestantism was 
still too numb to make them acknowledge that the Old 
Testament prophets and primitive Christianity taught a 
reign of righteousness on earth, and the sympathy of the 
Reformers with the common people was not sufficiently 
active to make the idea lovable to them. Neither Luther 
nor Calvin was by nature or conviction a democrat. Me- 
lanchthon taught that the Kingdom of Christ is ^'spiritual 
and internal," and all it means is ^Hhat Christ is seated 
on the right hand of the Father, interceding for us, and 
giving his Church forgiveness of sins and the Holy Ghost." 
It is significant that both Melanchthon and Calvin, the great 
theologians of the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches, shied 
away from the Apocalypse of John and let it severely alone. 
Nevertheless the Reformation marked a long stride 
toward the renaissance of social Christianity. We saw in 
the last chapter that among the chief influences obscuring 
the social ideal were the dominant place taken by the 
Church in the religious consciousness of medieval Chris- 
tianity, the absorbing intensity of other-worldly desires 
and beliefs, and the suppression of the common people and 
their instinctive social faith. At these three points the 
Reformation inaugurated a profound change. As to doc- 
trine it was a reform ; as to the Church it was a revolu- 
tion. The Reformation broke the hypnotic control over 
the intellect and outlook of men which the medieval 
Church had exercised, so that they could begin to estimate 
the plain secular facts and blessings of hfe on their own 
merits. The Church had been the great institution repre- 
senting the other world on earth ; its priesthood had opened 
the gate to heaven ; its sacraments had stood for the 
miraculous inflow of other-worldly powers. The Reforma- 
tion shattered the Church, denied the powers < of the priest- 



THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL HOPE 87 

hood, and abolished most of the sacraments. It denied 
the ascetic principle which was the ethical corollary of 
other-worldly views of life, emptied the monasteries, and 
did away with clerical celibacy. All this reduced the ab- 
normal other-worldHness of reHgion and turned a larger 
portion of the force of religion toward this world and its 
social interests. By dethroning the hierarchy, giving the 
laymen equal spiritual standing with the priest, and draw- 
ing the laity into the spiritual management of the churches, 
the Reformation began the process of dem.ocratizing re- 
Kgion. But democratic Christianity inevitably means 
social Christianity. In its final outworkings the Reforma- 
tion changed the Church in the direction toward which 
the democratic movements before the Reformation had 
striven, and in christianizing the Church, it set free the 
organized conscience of Christendom and made modern 
science, modern democracy, and modern social renovation 
possible. 

Every Reformation leader of course had some social 
aims in full view, but the actual social effects of their 
movement have been vaster and more sweeping than any 
of them dreamed. The theology for which they fought 
with all their conscious energy is now slowly fading from 
the consciousness of the churches they founded. On the 
other hand, the democracy and equality which they feared 
or which they abetted unconsciously, are gathering headway 
with the power of manifest destiny, and are now felt to be 
more essential in Christianity than the questions about 
the eucharist or predestination on which churches and 
nations were rent asunder. . These great leaders of men 
were themselves but tools in the hands of a higher wiU 
that was working out a larger end than they knew. 

It took a long time for the idea of the Kingdom of God 
to win a recognized place in Protestant theology, and still 
longer for it to become a religious force. It was usually re- 



88 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

garded as another word for the ^^nvisible Church/' the 
totahty of all the regenerate souls scattered through hu- 
manity and known to God alone. The coming of the 
Kingdom meant increasing purity of belief, growing warmth 
of religious life, and the missionary spread of Christianity. 
The whole conception was still circumscribed by the walls 
of the Church. Whenever a bolder note of hope for a 
reign of peace and justice on earth was sounded, it was 
usually blown on the old Jewish trumpet of apocalypticism 
and was a resuscitation of biblical ideas, rather than a 
spontaneous utterance of present-day faith. 

The eighteenth century marked the adolescence of the 
modern spirit. Science learned to stand erect and to cut 
that narrow pathway of knowledge which has since 
broadened into a highway for the nations. A strange 
enthusiasm for democracy and the rights of man was in 
the air. The historical method and spirit were taking 
possession of the world of intellect. The rehgious prin- 
ciples for which the Reformation fought, but which had 
so often been obscured under the dust and blood of the 
battle field, were becoming the assured possession of all. 
Philosophic minds, like Leibniz, Herder, and Kant, looked 
backward and forward over the history and the destiny of 
humanity with a broad sweep of comprehension. They 
no longer confined the saving work of God to Israel or the 
Church, but saw the Christ educating all mankind by all 
the varied agencies of human institutions. 

To such men the idea of the Kingdom of God offered 
itself as the only religious conception capacious enough for 
thoughts so large, for the Kingdom is an idea as broad as 
mankind, as inclusive as life itself, and as Christian as the 
Gospel.^ The lofty mind of Immanuel Kant was inspired 

^Johannes Weiss, "Die Idee des Reiches Gottes in der Theologie," Sec- 
tion IV, is especially rich in quotations and references to eighteenth-century 
thought. 



THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL HOPE 89 

with a religious enthusiasm by contemplating the possi- 
bility of an ethical commonwealth, a kingdom of virtue, in 
which right action would not, as in the State, be due to 
coercion, but to the free devotion of all. He held that in 
the past the upward aspirations of the individual have 
been corrupted or checked by the influence of society, 
which was a social force dominated by evil; therefore a 
new organization of society is needed, consciously dedicated 
to righteousness, which will support and train the weak 
will of the individual. Such a Kingdom of God would be 
at once the highest good and the highest duty. Its reali- 
zation is not like other duties, from man to man, but is a 
duty that the race owes to the race, the duty of reahzing 
its divine destiny. It is a duty so vast that it transcends 
the powers of man ; God alone can bring it to reaHty. But 
because we feel the duty, we may conclude that the Ruler 
of the moral universe is behind it and is cooperating with 
us, and each of us must work for it as if all depended on 
himself.^ 

So the conception of the Kingdom of God has forged to 
the front as the modern spirit has come to rehgious self- 
consciousness, and has been enlarged and modernized to 
make it the adequate receptacle for the vaster range of 
present-day knowledge. In recent years it has become the 
common possession of thoughtful rehgious men. Every 
constructive force in modern rehgion has contributed to 
its ascendency. 

The new historical study of the Bible has put it to the 
front. We have learned to see each biblical thought in its 
own historical environment and to let every bibHcal writer 
speak out his own ideas. No one has profited more by 
this willingness than Jesus himself. The ecKpse of the 
Kingdom idea was an eclipse of Jesus. We had listened 

^ Kant, "Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft," 
especially Section III. 



90 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

too much to voices talking about liim, and not enough to 
his own voice. Now his own thoughts in their HfeHke 
simpKcity and open-air fragrance have become a fresh 
rehgious possession, and when we hsten to Jesus, we can- 
not help thinking about the Kingdom of God. The new 
study of primitive Christianity has similarly forced on our 
attention the large place which ''the Coming of the Lord" 
and the millennial hope held in the religious life of the first 
generations. For four centuries theology has been simul- 
taneously modernizing itself and working backward toward 
Christ. The Reformation got back to the early Fathers 
and to Paul. We are getting back to Christ and to his 
faith in the possibiHty and certainty of the reign of God 
on earth. 

The spread of evolutionary ideas is another mark of 
modern rehgious thought. It has opened a vast historical 
outlook, backward and forward, and trained us in bold 
conceptions of the upward cHmb of the race. There is no 
denying that this has unsettled the ecclesiastical system of 
thought, much as the growth of tree roots will burst soHd 
masonry. But it has prepared us for understanding the 
idea of a Reign of God toward which all creation is moving. 
Translate the evolutionary theories into rehgious faith, 
and you have the doctrine of the Kingdom of God. This 
combination with scientific evolutionary thought has freed 
the Kingdom ideal of its catastrophic setting and its back- 
ground of demonism, and so adapted it to the climate of 
the modern world. 

The practical influence of foreign and home missions has 
been another constructive influence in modern Christianity 
which has aided the advance of the social conception of the 
Kingdom. The leaders of the missionary movement have 
been compelled to adopt imperial pohcies and to think in 
terms of nations and races. Missionaries have been forced 
by the facts of human hfe to look beyond the saving of 



THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL HOPE 9 1 

single souls and the establishment of churches to the chris- 
tianizing of social customs and institutions. The strategy 
of missions has taught us to reckon with generations in the 
slow implanting of new powers of spiritual hfe in great 
races. The ablest leaders of the missionary propaganda 
have been among the pioneers of the Kingdom idea, be- 
cause no other idea was adequate for their needs. The 
most effective expositions of this revolutionary new the- 
ology have come from the platform of missionary conven- 
tions, and not from the chairs of theological seminaries. 

Another great factor in modern Hfe which has helped to 
give real vitaHty to the Kingdom ideal is the enthusiasm 
for democracy. The gospel of the Kingdom proclaims the 
kingship of God, but somehow that always means the 
emancipation and democracy of the people. If God is 
king, the*Httle kings take their exit. Kings and churchmen 
have never been taken with the tune of the Kingdom of 
God when it was accompanied by the reverberating drum- 
beat of democratic passion. It is a significant fact that in 
Germany, where Christian sociahsts have felt bound to 
remain loyal supporters of the monarchy, the Kingdom of 
God is made the subject of learned exegetical studies, but 
is disconnected from the popular social aspirations and 
seems to awaken no enthusiasm. On the other hand, in 
the democratic countries, Switzerland, France, England, 
and America, it has become the great word of Christian 
socialism. 

But the cause which above all others has lent religious 
power to the Kingdom ideal is its connection with the new 
social enthusiasm. Wherever men absorb the bolder social 
purposes and yet keep in loyal connection with historical 
Christianity, they realize that the idea of the Reign of God 
on earth combines these two fundamental forces of their 
life, — and nothing else does. I remember how Father 
McGlynn, sp>eaking at Cooper Union in the first Single 



92 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Tax campaign in New York, in 1886, recited the words, 
^^Thy kingdom come ! Thy will be done on earth/' and 
as the great audience realized for the first time the social 
significance of the holy words, it lifted them off their seats 
with a shout of joy. In the first century ^^the Kingdom 
of God" meant a combination of the religious and the social 
hopes of the common people. To-day the same elements 
are fusing once more under new conditions, and the same 
spirit has taken possession of the ancient word. One of 
the earhest services of social Christianity has been that it 
has revitalized that great idea and reintroduced the Church 
to her own earliest gospel. 

That ascendency of the Kingdom idea in modern re- 
ligious life which I have attempted to trace has been one 
of the determining facts in my own spiritual experience, 
and perhaps this personal note may add something to the 
discussion. 

Twenty-five years ago, in the early dawn of the social 
awakening, we young men were groping in the dark. All 
our Christian intuitions assured us that this new call for 
social justice was of God, and that the very spirit of our 
Master was urging us on. But the older brethren told us 
that the true function of the ministry was not to ^' serve 
tables," but to save the immortal souls of men. One told 
me that these were ^^mere questions of mine and thine," 
and had nothing to do with the Gospel. A young mis- 
sionary going to Africa to an early death implored me almost 
with tears to dismiss these social questions and give myself 
to ^^ Christian work." Such appeals were painfully up- 
setting. All our inherited ideas, all theological literature, 
all the practices of church life, seemed to be against us. 
There was no room in Bethlehem for this new-born interest 
of ours, and we young men were not yet ready to assert 
that this was the prince of the house of David coming to 
claim his ancestral home, and with vastly more rights in 



THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL HOPE 93 

the place than most of the furniture with which our wise 
friends had helped to fill it. So we visited him as he lay 
in the manger and took comfort in certain humble folk who 
had strange tales of songs by night and foretellings of great 
joy to come. 

When the forgotten social ideas of the Christian evangel 
did become clear to us, we felt Hke young Columbuses tak- 
ing possession of a new continent. In 1891 I spent a year 
of study in Germany, partly on the teachings of Jesus, and 
partly on sociology. That is a good combination and likely 
to produce results. In the Alps I have seen the summit of 
some great mountain come out of the clouds in the early 
morn and stand revealed in blazing purity. Its foot was 
still swathed in drifting mist, but I knew the mountain was 
there and my soul rejoiced in it. So Christ's conception 
of the Kingdom of God came to me as a new revelation. 
Here was the idea and purpose that had dominated the 
mind of the Master himself. All his teachings center about 
it. His life was given to it. His death was suffered for 
it. When a man has once seen that in the Gospels, he 
can never unsee it again. 

When the Kingdom of God dominated our landscape, 
the perspective of hfe shifted into a new ahgnment. I felt 
J a new security in my social impulses. The spiritual au- 
thority of Jesus Christ would have been sufficient to offset 
the weight of all the doctors, and I now knew that I had 
history on my side. But in addition I. found that this 
new conception of the purpose of Christianity was strangely 
satisfying. It responded to all the old and all the new 
elements of my religious life. The saving of the lost, the 
teaching of the young, the pastoral care of the poor and 
frail, the quickening of starved intellects, the study of the 
Bible, church union, pohtical reform, the reorganization 
of the industrial system, international peace, — it was all 
covered by the one aim of the Reign of God on earth. 



94 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

That idea is necessarily as big as humanity, for it means the 
divine transformation of all human life. It alone can say 
without limitation, '^Nil humani a me alienum.'^ ^ 

In 1892 a number of us, who were all passing through 
the same molting process, organized the Brotherhood of 
the Kingdom and dedicated ourselves to the task of ''^re- 
storing that idea in the thought of the Church and of 
realizing it in the world." ^ The organization has been 
too unselfish to become large, but it was a powerful support 
and stimulus in those early days of isolation. The course 
of events since then has justified it. Of all the ideas which 
we were then trying to work out, there is not one but has 
become a recognized and commanding issue. Of the men 
who then trusted the inner voice and the outer call an un- 
usual number have risen to positions of acknowledged lead- 
ership in the face of a sentiment that was long hostile to 
their convictions. I attribute this to the fact that the 
all-inclusive conception of Christianity w^hich they adopted 
set them large tasks, unified their otherwise scattered 
interests, inspired them with religious joy, compelled them 
to fight for God, and so made strong men of them. The 
experience of this group is typical of that of uncounted 
others. The triumphant return of the Kingdom idea has 
marked its line of march by thrice-born men. 

Now that the conception of the Kingdom of God has 
reentered Christian thought, all religious thinking will have 
to be done in a new synthesis. In the past the theology 
of the Church could be stated with scarcely a mention of 
that purpose which had been the central thought of Christ. 
Christian hymn books could be compiled without giving 
expression to this mighty religious hope and motive. Now 

1 "Nothing that is human is ahen to me.'' 

2 Information about the Brotherhood of the Kingdom may be secured 
from the secretary, Rev. Leighton Williams, D.D., Amity House, 312 West 
54th Street, New York City. 



THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL HOPE . 95 

the Church will have to recast its systematic and practical 
theology, its ritual, its prayers, its hymns, and its evan- 
gelism to make room, not simply for the terminology, 
but for the aims, the motives, the passions, the philosophy, 
which are summed up in the phrase '^ihe Kingdom of 
God." ^ But in thus readjusting itself, it will be working 
out its own salvation, and will become the organ of a 
more searching and constructive redemption for modern 
humanity. 

^ To illustrate my meaning, I may be allowed to refer to a pioneering ven- 
ture in one of these directions, made in my book, ''For God and the People, 
Prayers of the Social Awakening," published in 19 10 by the Pilgrim Press. 
The response to these prayers, when a few of them were published in the 
American Magazine, and the fruitful use made of them afterward, confirmed 
me in my conviction that there is a great untapped reservoir of religion in 
the interests which lie outside of the Church but inside of the Kingdom. 



CHAPTER V 

A RELIGION EOR SOCIAL REDEMPTION 

We set out with the proposition that we need a rehgious 
faith to inspire and guide us in that task of redeeming the 
social hfe of humanity which is clearly laid upon our 
generation. We have found that faith. Not in traditional 
theology, Catholic or Protestant, but in the Christianity 
of Jesus Christ himself. Traditional religion had many 
scattered social motives and impulses, but it lacked a 
fundamental dogma of social redemption. The religion 
that lived in the heart of Jesus and spoke in his words, 
not only had a social faith ; it was a social faith. The 
Church has authority over us only so far as she embodies 
the mind of Christ ; when she has allowed his central pur- 
pose to be set to one side or forgotten, we follow the Master. 

Our trust in his leadership is once more confirmed by 
finding that his religious aim, the Reign of God on earth, 
has quietly risen to new clearness and power simultaneously 
with the development of modern life. The most ancient 
dogma of Christianity by an inherent necessity is becoming 
the instinctive and spontaneous faith of our own age. That 
fact creates a presumption of God-willed spiritual destiny. 

I wish now to show that the faith of the Kingdom of 
God is fundamentally adapted to inspire and guide us in 
christianizing the social order. 

First of all, it is a religion for this earth and for the 
present Hfe. The old rehgious aims overemphasized the 
other world and undervalued the present world. They 
taught men to regard the earth as a vale of tears, a place 

96 



A RELIGION FOR SOCIAL REDEMPTION 97 

of pilgrimage through which we must hasten, a vestibule 
of heaven or hell. The body with its instincts was an 
enemy of the soul. Ascetic suppression of its desires was 
a logical corollary of this intense concentration on the life 
to come. The eye of faith was turned upward and saw all 
its visions beyond the stars. 

On the other hand, the faith of the KLingdom puts a new 
religious value on this earth of ours and on the present 
life. This earth is even now the habitation of God, and it is 
ours to make it wholly so. It is not a place to be spurned, 
but a home to be loved and made clean and holy. The 
vision of the Reign of God creates a far keener and more 
impatient sense of the present reign of sin, but the belief 
in the redemptibihty of this earth permits no dumb resig- 
nation, but puts the sword into our hands and sends us to 
the front. This joyful religious acceptance of the present 
life involves no surrender of the Hfe to come. When our 
work for God is done and we are tired, when our growth 
in God has exhausted the opportunities offered by the 
present hfe, we can he down secure in the hope that our 
Hfe will unfold in greater fullness in a new environment 
adapted to the garnered results of the present Hfe. But 
for the present we are here. Here we must see our visions, 
and here we must realize them. The hope of the Kingdom 
of God makes this earth the theater of action, and turns 
the full force of reHgious will and daring toward the present 
tasks. 

Further, the faith of the Kingdom of God wastes no 
strength on religious paraphernaHa, but concentrates it all 
on the real task of redemption. Religion in the past has 
always spent a large proportion of its force on doings that 
were apart from the real business of life, on sacrificing, 
on endless prayers, on traveling to Mecca, Jerusalem, or 
Rome, on kissing sacred stones, bathing in sacred rivers, 
cHmbing sacred stairs, and a thousand things that had at 



98 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

best an indirect bearing on the practical social relations 
between men and their fellows. It is the glory of Chris- 
tianity that at least in its purer forms it has wasted so Uttle 
of its driving force on such ^'religious" actions, and has 
estabHshed so close a connection between religion and 
ethics. But the old rehgion of other-worldly salvation 
necessarily diverted immense currents of energy toward 
actions that were apart from daily hfe. 

On the other hand, the Kingdom of God calls for no 
ceremonial, for no specific doings. It insists solely that 
the natural relations among men which God has created 
shall be ruled by God's will. It demands an organized 
fellowship of mankind, based on justice and resulting in 
love, binding all men together in strong bonds of trust, 
helpfulness, purity, and good will. Like Jesus, it makes 
love to God and love to man the sole outlet for the energy 
of rehgion, and thereby harnesses that energy to the ethical 
purification of the natural social relations of men. 

We are a wasteful nation. We have long wasted our 
forests and the fertility of our fields. We pour the precious 
sewage of our cities into our rivers and harbors to defile 
and poison the water. We waste child life, the dearest 
and costHest product of the nation, by needless mortahty. 
We waste the sufferings and pangs of motherhood that 
brought the children into being. We waste the splendid ' 
strength of manhood by industrial accidents and tuber- 
culosis. But the most terrible waste of all has been the 
waste of the power of religion on dress performances. If 
that incalculable power from the beginning of time had 
been directed inteUigently toward the creation of a righteous 
human society, we should now be talking on a level with 
angels. 

Again, the idea of the Kingdom of God on earth will 
improve our social relations because it gives religious value 
to the plain man's job. A religion which prepared souls 






A RELIGION FOR SOCIAL REDEMPTION 99 

for heaven put a high valuation on professions that dealt 
with the soul, on the calling of the minister, the teacher, 
the artist, the mother, and persons in these professions 
could feel the pride and joy of nobler aims running through 
their daily work if they were people of religious mind. 
When they did their daily work, they were aiding the souls 
of men and serving God. But the ^'butcher and baker and 
candlestick maker," who were dealing with coarse and 
material things, had no such hallowing consciousness of 
their calling. A man might prove his Christianity by 
baking an honest pound loaf of bread, but the bread itself 
did not seem to be a contribution to religious ends. 

.On the other hand, the Kingdom of God deals not only 
with the immortal souls of men, but with their bodies, 
their nourishment, their homes, their cleanliness, and it 
makes those who serve these fundamental needs of life 
veritable ministers of God. Are they not serving the com- 
mon good? Are they not working sacramental miracles 
by cooperating with that mysterious power which satisfies 
the want of every living thing by making the grain and the 
tree to grow ? If they do their job well, that job itself is 
their chief ministry to men and part of their worship of 
God. Whenever they strive to increase their serviceable- 
ness to humanity, they make another advance toward the 
Kingdom of God. On the other hand, if a man does his 
job badly, or turns the goods he makes into means of ex- 
tortion, he is sinning not only against individuals, but 
against God by breaking down and setting back the King- 
dom of God on earth. If the conception of the Kingdom of 
God came to be the working faith of our modern world, 
every business man would confront the question whether 
his business as a total, in the goods it turns out and in the 
men it employs, is advancing or retarding the Reign of God 
on earth. Our entire business system would be under the 
condemnation of reHgion until it was an institutionalized 



lOO CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

expression of the Christian law of mutual service. If our 
business men engaged in reorganizing business for that 
higher end, they could for the first time in history have 
the same ennobling sense of serving God which a minister, 
a teacher, or a mother may now have. They are now a 
disinherited class in religion. They have a religious sense 
of worth mainly when they are doing something for their 
church or their philanthropies outside of their business. 
The Kingdom faith, once lodged in a man's mind, compels 
every man to become a redeemer, and his cliief redemptive 
ministry is through his job. 

The conception of the Kingdom of God. will also demand 
the development of a Christian ethic for public hfe. We 
have none now. Our religion in the past was a rehgion of 
private salvation; consequently it developed an effective 
private morality. It had no ideal of salvation for the 
organic life of society ; consequently it developed no ade- 
quate public morality. The conclusive proof of this asser- 
tion is the fact that the Christian Church during the nine- 
teenth century allowed a huge system of mammonistic 
exploitation to grow up which was destructive of human 
decency, integrity, and brotherhood, and the Church did 
not realize its essential immorality until its havoc had be- 
come a world-wide scandal which even the most blunted 
conscience could comprehend. Other-worldly religion was 
sensitive about anything that endangered the salvation of 
the soul, for that was its one great object. The virulence 
of sins was measured by their influence on the soul of the 
sinner rather than by their effect on society. A church 
member might be .disciplined for using the name of God 
profanely, and be left in peace if he paid his employees 
sinfully low wages and brutalized the image of God in them. 
When Christian men are taught to judge all their actions 
by the effect which they have on the advance of the Reign 
of God among, men, we shall restandardize all our sins 



A RELIGION FOR SOCIAL REDEMPTION lOI 

according to their social destructiveness, and assign a far 
greater damnatory value to some of the most respectable 
sort. 

As that religious conception gets a lodgment in any 
mind, there will be one more recruit available for the com- 
mon attack against the powers of social destruction. 

Every reform would get a higher meaning, and also a 
more judicious balance, if it were connected with the central 
purpose of the reign of God. 

That great rehgious hope would put an eternal signifi- 
cance and beauty into the slightest act of unselfish and 
chivalrous help, just as the cup of cold water becomes a 
sacrament when it is hallowed by the thought of Christ. 

The temptation to use tricky or foul means to attain a 
reform would be checked if that reform were seen as part 
of the Kingdom of God. We should realize that the sum 
total of good cannot be increased by increasing the total 
of evil. 

If the KLingdom of God on earth once more became the 
central object of religion, Christianity would necessarily 
resume the attitude of attack with which it set out. When 
it faced a hostile world and waited for the coming of the 
Lord and the establishment of his Kingdom, it had the 
temper of the pioneer. It has had the same spirit wherever 
it has had to lay the foundations for a Christian social 
order in heathen nations. But where it has taken the 
existing .social order for granted and has devoted itself to 
saving souls, it has become a conservative force, bent on 
maintaining the great institution of the Church and pre- 
serving the treasure of doctrine and supernatural grace 
committed to it. When we accept the faith of the King- 
dom of God, we take the same attitude toward our own 
social order which missionaries take toward the social Hfe 
of heathenism. Instead of feeling under obligations to 
defend things as they are, Christian men would be under 



I02 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

religious constraint to be the most searching moral judges 
of the present conditions. They would have a social 
ideal so large and daring that the program of all other 
reformers would be only fragments of the Christian pro- 
gram. The Church would have to ^^ about face.'' The 
center of gravity in the whole Christian structure of history 
would be shifted from the past to the future. 

As that marching attitude would become common, it 
would create an instinctive sympathy with all who are 
championing humane causes. The adventurous and chival- 
rous spirit would be set free in religion, and that would win 
the virile spirit of youth. The young always shrink from 
the ladylike and innocuous saint, and prefer a courageous 
sinner to a bloodless Christian. But there is a wonderfully 
swift response whenever any one dares to summon them for 
some forlorn hope in the service of Christ. The Kingdom 
of God would evoke the spirit of battle and the finest temper 
of sport. Indeed the Kingdom of God is the greatest fight 
for which men ever enlisted, and the biggest game that was 
ever played. The odds are always against you. It is 
just as if a lone little eleven on the gridiron should see the 
whole crowd from the bleachers pouring down into the 
field and lining up against them. Yet you know in your 
soul that you are bound to win, for God. is playing on your 
side, and God has unusual staying powers. All who have 
ever fought for the Kingdom of God know that there is 
a strange joy in it. The -memory of one good fight for 
freedom or justice gives a thrilling sense of worth for a 
life-time. There is even a stern sense of humor as you 
watch the crowd rolling down on you and you wait to be 
trampled on. 

What would it be worth for social redemption to have 
that spirit become common among religious men ? 



CHAPTER VI 

SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION 

We who know personal religion by experience know that 
there is nothing on earth to compare with the moral force 
exerted by it. It has demonstrated its social efl&ciency in 
our own lives. It was personal religion which first set us 
our tasks of service in youth, and which now holds us to 
them when our body droops and our spirit flags. Religion 
can turn diffident, humble men like Shaftesbury into in- 
vincible champions of the poor. All social movements 
would gain immensely in enthusiasm, persuasiveness, and 
wisdom, if the hearts of their advocates were cleansed and 
warmed by religious faith. Even those who know religious 
power only by observation on others will concede that. 

But will the reenforcement work the other way, also ? 
Religion strengthens the social spirit ; will the social spirit 
strengthen personal religion? When a minister gets hot 
about child labor and wage slavery, is he not apt to get 
cold about prayer meetings and evangelistic efforts ? When 
young women become interested in social work, do they 
not often lose their taste for the culture of the spiritual life 
and the peace of religious meditation ? A hot breakfast is 
an event devoutly to be desired, but is it wise to chop up 
your precious old set of colonial furniture to cook the break- 
fast? Would the reenforcement of the social spirit be 
worth while if we lost our personal religion in the process ? 

If this is indeed the alternative, we are in a tragic situa- 
tion, compelled to choose between social righteousness and 
communion with God. 

103 



I04 CHRISTIANIZING TH^: SOCIAL ORDER 



Personal religion has a supreme value for its own sake 
not merely as a feeder of social morality, but as the highest 
unfolding of life itself, as the blossoming of our spiritual 
nature. Spiritual regeneration is the most important fact 
in any life history. A living experience of God is the 
crowning knowledge attainable to a human mind. Each 
one of us needs the redemptive power of religion for his 
own sake, for on the tiny stage of the human soul all the 
vast world tragedy of good and evil is reenacted. In the 
best social order that is conceivable men will still smolder 
with lust and ambition, and be lashed by hate and jealousy 
as with the whip of a slave driver. No material comfort 
and plenty can satisfy the restless soul in us and give us 
peace with ourselves. All who have made test of it agree 
that religion alone holds the key to the ultimate meaning 
of life, and each of us must find his way into the inner 
mysteries alone. The day will come when all life on this 
planet will be extinct, and what meaning will our social 
evolution have had if that is all? Religion is eternal life 
in the midst of time and transcending time. The explana- 
tions of religion have often been the worst possible, God 
knows, but the fact of religion is the biggest thing there is. 

If, therefore, our personal religious life is likely to be 
sapped by our devotion to social work, it would be a 
calamity second to none. But is it really likely that this 
will happen? The great aim underlying the whole social 
movement is the creation of a free, just, and brotherly 
social order. This is the greatest moral task conceivable. 
Its accomplishment is the manifest will of God for this 
generation. Every Christian motive is calling us to it. 
If it is left undone, millions of lives will be condemned to a 
deepening moral degradation and to spiritual staryation. 
Does it look probable that we shall lose our contact with 
God if we plunge too deeply into this work? Does it 
stand to reason that we shall go astray from Jesus Christ 



1 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION IO5 

if we engage in the unequal conflict with organized wrong ? 
What kind of ^'spifituaUty '' is it which is Ukely to get hurt 
by being put to work for justice and our fellow-men ? 

Some of the anxiety about personal religion is due to a 
subtle lack of faith in rehgion. Men think it is a fragile 
thing that will break up and vanish when the customs and 
formulas which have hitherto incased and protected it are 
broken and cast aside. Most of us have known rehgion 
under one form, and we suppose it can have no other. 
But religion is the Hfe of God in the soul of man, and is 
God really so fragile ? Will the tongue of fire sputter and 
go out unless we shelter it under a bushel ? Let the winds 
of God roar through it, and watch it ! Religion unites a 
great variability of form with an amazing constancy of 
power. The Protestant Reformation changed the entire 
outward complexion of religion in the nations of northern 
Europe. All the most characteristic forms in which Chris- 
tianity had expressed itself and by which its strength had 
hitherto been gauged were swept away. No pope, no 
priest, no monk, no mass, no confessional, no rosary, no 
saints, no images, no processions, no pilgrimages, no indul- 
gences ! It was a clean sweep. What was left of rehgion ? 
Religion . itself ! At least your Puritans and Huguenots 
seemed to think they had personal religion ; more, in fact, 
than ever before. Cathohcs thought it was the destruction 
of personal religion ; really it was the rise of a new type of 
religion. In the same way the social Christianity of to-day 
is not a dilution of personal religion, but a new form of ex- 
perimental Christianity, and its religious testimony will 
have to be heard henceforth when ^'the varieties of reU- 
gious experience" are described.^ 

Nevertheless, conservative Christian men are not 

^My friend Elie Gounelle has a fine discussion on this in his book, 
"Pourquoi sommes-nous Chretiens sociaux?" p. 29 (Librairie Fischbacher, 
Paris). A remarkable little book. 



Io6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

frightened by their own imaginings when they fear that 
the progress of the social interest will mean a receding of 
personal religion. They usually have definite cases in 
mind in which that seemed to be the effect, and it is well 
worth while to examine these more closely. 

In the first place, personal religion collapses with some 
individuals, because in their case it had long been growing 
hollow and thin. Not all who begin the study of music 
or poetry in youth remain lovers of art and literature to 
the end, and not all who begin a religious life in the ardor 
of youth keep up its emotional intimacy as life goes on. 
Take any group of one hundred religious people, laymen 
or ministers, and it is a safe guess that in a considerable 
fraction of them the fire of vital religion is merely flickering 
in the ashes. As long as their life goes on in the accustomed 
way, they maintain their religious connections and expres- 
sions, and do so sincerely, but if they move to another part 
of the country, or if a new interest turns their minds 
forcibly in some other direction, the frayed bond parts 
and they turn from their Church and religion. If it is the 
social interest which attracts them, it may seem to them 
and others that this has extinguished their devotional life. 
In reality there was little personal religion to lose, and that 
little would probably have been lost in some other way. 
This would cover the inner history of some ministers as well 
as of church members. 

In other cases we must recognize that men become 
apathetic about church activities in which they have been 
interested, because they have found something better. 
The ^Hebrew prophets turned in anger from the sacrificial 
doings of their people; Jesus turned away from the long 
prayers of the Pharisees, who were the most pious peo- 
ple of his day; the Reformers repudiated many of the 
most devout activities of medieval Catholicism. Wherever 
there is a new awakening of spiritual life, there is a dis- 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION 107 

carding of old religious forms, and it is to the interest of 
personal religion that there should be. Is there nothing 
petty, useless, and insipid in the CathoHc or Protestant 
church Ufe of our day from which a soul awakened to larger 
purposes ought really to turn away? Is it reprehensible 
if some drop out of a dress parade when they hear the sound 
of actual fighting just across the hills ? 

It is also true that in this tremendous awakening and 
unsettlement some turn away in haste from things which 
have lasting value. Few men and few movements have 
such poise that they never overshoot the mark. When the 
Reformation turned its back on medieval superstition, it 
also smashed the painted windows of the cathedrals and 
almost banished art and music from its services. When 
mystics feel the compelling power of the inner word of 
God, they are apt to shght the written word. So when 
religious souls who have been shut away from social ideals 
and interests and pent up within a fine but contracted re- 
ligious habitation get the new outlook of the social awaken- 
ing, it sweeps them away with new enthusiasms. Their 
life rushes in to fill the empty spaces. Their mind is busy 
with a reHgious comprehension of a hundred new facts and 
problems, and the old questions of personal rehgion drop 
out of sight. In such cases we can safely trust to experi- 
ence to restore the equilibrium. In a number of my younger 
friends the balancing is now going on. As they work their 
way in life and realize the real needs of men and the real 
values of life, they get a new comprehension of the power 
and preciousness of personal and intimate reUgion, and they 
turn back to the old truths of Christianity with a fresh 
reUsh and a firmer accent of conviction. We shall see that 
rediscovery in thousands within a few years. No doubt 
they are to blame for their temporary one-sidedness, but 
their blame will have to be shared by generations of re- 
ligious individuahsts whose own persistent one-sidedness 



Io8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

had distorted the rounded perfection of Christianity and 
caused the present excessive reaction. 

The question takes a wider meaning when we turn to 
the aUenation of entire classes from reHgion. There is no 
doubt that in all the industrialized nations of Europe, and 
in our own country, the working classes are dropping out 
of connection with their churches and synagogues, and to 
a large extent are transferring their devotion to social 
movements, so that it looks as if the social interest displaced 
religion. But here, too, we must remember that solid masses 
of the population of continental Europe have never had 
much vital reHgion to lose. Their religion was taught by 
rote and performed by rote. It was gregarious and not 
personal. Detailed investigations have been made of the 
religious thought world of the peasantry or industrial popu- 
lation of limited districts, and the result always is that the 
centuries of indoctrination by the Church have left only a 
very thin crust of fertile religious conviction and experi- 
ence behind. This is not strange, for whenever any spon- 
taneous and democratic religion has arisen among the 
people, the established churches have done their best to 
wet-blanket and suppress it, and they have succeeded 
finely. When these people cut loose from their churches, 
they may not be getting much farther away from God. 
Usually these unchurched people still have a strong native 
instinct for religion, and when the vital issues and convic- 
tions of their own hfe are Hf ted into the purer Ught of Jesus 
Christ and set on fire by rehgious faith, they respond. 

A new factor enters the situation when we encounter 
the influence of ^^ scientific socialism. " It is true, the party 
platform declares that ^^ religion is a private affair." The 
saving of souls is the only industry that socialism distinctly 
relegates to private enterprise. If that meant simply 
separation of Church and State, Americans could heartily 
assent. If it meant that the Socialist Party proposes to be 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION 109 

the political organization of the working class for the 
attainment of economic ends and to be neutral in all other 
questions, it would be prudent tactics. But in practice it 
means more. The socialism of continental Europe, taking 
it by and large, is actively hostile, not only to bad forms of 
organized religion, but to religion itself. Churchmen feel 
that a man is lost to religion when he joins the Sociahst 
Party, and socialist leaders feel that a socialist who is still 
an active Christian is only half baked. When French and 
German socialists learn that men trained in the democracy 
and vitality of the free churches of England and America 
combine genuine piety and ardent devotion to the Sociahst 
Party, it comes to them as a shock of surprise. In May, 
1910, about 260 delegates of the Enghsh ^^Brotherhoods" 
visited Lille in France and were received by the French 
trades-unionists and socialists with parades and pubHc 
meetings. The crowds on the streets did not know what 
to make of it when they saw the Englishmen marching 
under the red flag of sociahsm ^nd yet bearing banners 
with the inscriptions: ^^We represent 500,000 English 
workmen;'' ^^We proclaim the Fatherhood of God and the 
Brotherhood of Man;'' ^^ Jesus Christ leads and inspires 
us." What were these men. Christians or socialists? 
They could not be both. The Frenchmen lost all their 
bearings when they heard Keir Hardie, the veteran English 
labor leader and socialist, repudiating clericalism, but glori- 
fying the Gospel and the spirit of Christ, and declaring 
that it was Christianity which had made a socialist of him. 
The antireligious attitude of continental socialism is 
comprehensible enough if we study its historical causes 
dispassionately. Its most active ingredient is anticlerical- 
ism. I surmise that if some of us Americans had been 
in the shoes of these foreign workingmen and had seen the 
priest from their angle of vision, we should be anticlerical 
too. But in the old churches religion, the Church, and 



no CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the priest mean the same thing; you must accept all or 
reject all. Men do not discriminate when they are hot 
with ancient wrongs. 

Another ingredient in socialist unbelief is modern science 
and skepticism. Socialists share their irreligion with other 
radicals. They are unbelievers, not simply because they 
are socialists, but because they are children of their time. 
Great masses of upper-class and middle-class people in Europe 
are just as skeptical and materialistic, though they show no 
touch of red. Socialists have no monopoly of unbelief. 

But in addition to this, materialistic philosophy does 
come to socialists embodied in their own literature as part 
of socialist ^'science." The socialist faith was formulated 
by its intellectual leaders at a time when naturalism and 
materialism was the popular philosophy of the intellectuals, 
and these elements were woven into the dogma of the new 
movement. Great movements always perpetuate the ideas 
current at the time when they are in their fluid and for- 
mative stage. For instance, some of the dogmas of the 
Christian Church are still formulated in the terminology 
of a philosophy that was current in the third and fourth 
centuries. Calvin worked out a system of thought that is 
stamped with his powerful personahty and with the pecul- 
iarities of his age. But after it had once become the dog- 
matic fighting faith of great organized bodies, it was all 
handed on as God's own truth. Socialism is the most 
solid and militant organization since Calvinism, and it is 
just as dogmatic. Thus we have the tragic fact that the 
most idealistic mass movement of modern times was com- 
mitted at the outset to a materialistic philosophy with which 
it had no essential connection, and every individual who comes 
under its influence and control is liable to be assimilated to 
its t3^e of thought in rehgion as well as in economics.^ 

1 While I was writing these pages I received a letter from a socialist who 
had read "Christianity and the Social Crisis.'' "Speaking for the proleta- 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION III 

Those who fear the influence of the social interest on 
personal religion are not, therefore, wholly wrong. In any 
powerful spiritual . movement, even the best, there are 
yeasty, unsettling forces which may do good in the long 
run, but harm in the short run. Atheistic socialism may 
influence the religious life of great classes as deforestation 
affects a mountain side. 

On the other hand, where the new social spirit combines 
harmoniously with the inherited Christian life, a new type 
of personal religion is produced which has at least as good 
a right to existence as any other type. Jesus was not a 
theological Christian, nor a churchman, nor an emotional- 
ist, nor an ascetic, nor a contemplative mystic. A mature 
social Christian comes closer to the likeness of Jesus Christ 
than any other type. 

In religious individualism, even in its sweetest forms, 
there was a subtle twist of self-seeking which vitiated its 
Christlikeness. Thomas a Kempis' ^'Imitation of Christ " 
and Bunyan's ^^ Pilgrim's Progress" are classical expres- 
sions of personal religion, the one Roman CathoHc and 
monastic, the other Protestant and Puritan. In both 
piety is self-centered. In both we are taught to seek the 

rian class, I shall say that we all, who have gone far enough in the study of 
socialism to become revolutionary, regard the so-called Christian churches 
as our bitterest enemies. It is an axiom among us that any man who comes 
into our party must drop his religion (by that, of course, I mean churchian- 
ity) before he can become a valuable member of the socialist party. And 
he always does. I did. It is a fact that most of us are atheists, not because 
we want to be, but because the churches are always on the side of our enemies. 
They preach against us. As a consequence, the hardest person to wake up 
is the workingman who has been chloroformed by the church in the interest 
of the master class. . . . Personally I do not want to see the churches take 
your advice. Keep them out of our movement. We have built it so far 
with blood and tears without their help. I believe in God. I do not know 
whether I believe in immortality. I would like to, and so would all my 
comrades. I am by nature religious. Worship is a necessity of the human 
heart and I am lost without something to cling to." This letter in its mix- 
ture of anger and longing doubtless expresses the attitude of a great number. 



112 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

highest good of the soul by turning away from the world 
of men. Doubtless the religion of the monastery and of 
the Puritan community was far more social and human than 
the theory might indicate. Bunyan seems to have felt 
by instinct that it was not quite right to have Christian 
leave his wife and children and neighbors behind to get rid 
of his burden and reach the heavenly city. So he wrote 
a sequel to his immortal story in which the rest of the 
family with several friends set out on the same pilgrimage. 
This second part is less thrilling, but more wholesomely 
Christian. There is family life, love-making, and mar- 
riage on the way. A social group cooperate in salvation. 
Bunyan was feeling his way toward social Christianity. 

Evangelicalism prides itself on its emphasis on sin and 
the need of conversion, yet some of the men trained in its 
teachings do not seem to know the devil when they meet 
him on the street. The most devastating sins of our age 
do not look Hke sins to them. They may have been con- 
verted from the world, but they contentedly make their 
money in the common ways of the world. Social Chris- 
tianity involves a more trenchant kind of conversion and 
more effective means of grace. It may teach a more 
lenient theory of sin, but it gives a far keener eye for the 
lurking places of concrete and profitable sins. A man 
who gets the spiritual ideals of social Christianity is really 
set at odds with ^^the world" and enlisted in a lifelong fight 
with organized evil. But no man who casts out devils is 
against Christ. To fight evil involves a constant affir- 
mation of holiness and hardens the muscles of Christian 
character better than any religious gymnasium work. 
To very many Christians of the old type the cross of Christ 
meant only an expedient in the scheme of redemption, 
not a law of life for themselves. A man can be an ex- 
ponent of ^^the higher life" and never suffer any perse- 
cution whatever from the powers that control our sin- 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION II 3 

ridden social life. On the other hand, if any man takes 
social Christianity at all seriously, he will certainly en- 
counter opposition and be bruised somehow. Such an 
experience will throw him back on the comforts of God 
and make his prayers more than words. When he bears 
on his own body and soul the marks of the Lord Jesus, the 
cross will be more than a doctrine to him. It will be a bond 
uniting him with Christ in a fellow^ship of redemptive love. 

The personal religion created by social Christianity will 
stand one practical test of true rehgion which exceeds in 
value most of the proofs offered by theology : it creates a 
larger life and the power of growth. Dead religion narrows 
our freedom, contracts our horizon, limits our sympathies, 
and dwarfs our stature. Live religion brings a sense of 
emancipation, the exhilaration of spiritual health, a tenderer 
affection for all Hving things, widening thoughts and aims, 
and a sure conviction of the reality and righteousness of 
God. Devotion to the Reign of God on earth will do that 
for a man, and will do it continuously. A self-centered 
rehgion reaches the dead Une soon. Men get to know the 
whole scheme of salvation, and henceforth they march up 
the hill only to march down again. On the contrary, 
when a man's prime object is not his soul, but the King- 
dom of God, he has set his hands to a task that will never 
end and will always expand. It will make ever larger 
demands on his intellect, his sympathy, and his practical 
efficiency. It will work him to the last ounce of his strength. 
But it will keep him growing. 

It is charged that those who become interested in "social 
work" lose interest in "personal work." Doubtless there 
is truth in that, and it is a regrettable one-sidedness. It 
is only fair to remember, however, that they share this loss 
of interest with the entire American Church. Evangelism 
itself had long become so one-sided, mechanical, and super- 
ficial in its gospel and methods that the present apathy 



114 



CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



can be explained only as a reaction from it. Precisely 
those who have themselves gone through its experiences 
are now reluctant to submit young people to it. The 
social gospel will gradually develop its own evangelistic 
methods and its own personal appeals. What was called 
^^ personal work" was often not personal at all, but a whole- 
sale regimentation of souls. It offered the same prescrip- 
tion, the same formula of doctrine, the same spiritual 
exercises and emotions for all. Those who add the new 
social intelligence to the old rehgious love of man's soul 
will take every man in his own social place and his own 
human connections, will try to understand his peculiar 
sin and failure from his own point of view, and see by what 
means salvation can effectively be brought to him. Such 
an evangelism would be more truly personal than the old ; 
it would have more sense of the individuality of each man. 
As Robert A. Woods finely says, ^^It calls each man by his 
name." 

Christianity must offer every man a full salvation. The 
individualistic gospel never did this. Its evangelism never 
recognized more than a fractional part of the saving forces 
at work in God's world. Salvation was often whittled 
down to a mere doctrinal proposition ; assent to that, and 
you were saved. Social Christianity holds to all the real 
values in the old methods, but rounds them out to meet all 
the needs of human life. 

Salvation is always a social process. It comes by human 
contact. The word must become flesh if it is to save. 
Some man or woman, or some group of people, in whom the 
saving love of Jesus Christ has found a new incarnation, 
lays hold of an enfeebled, blinded human atom and infuses 
new hope and courage and insight, new warmth of love and 
strength of will, and there is a new breathing of the soul and 
an opening of the inner eye. Salvation has begun. That 
man or group of men was a fragment of the Kingdom of 
God in humanity ; God dwelt in them and therefore power 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION II 5 

could go out from them. When a lost soul is infolded in a 
new society, a true humanity, then there is a chance of 
salvation.^ No matter what set of opinions they hold, 
such men and women have been one of the most precious 
assets of our American life, and a social theorist who scoffs 
at them is bhnd with dogmatic prejudice. 

When the Church insisted that it is the indispensable 
organ of salvation, it insisted on the social factor in redemp- 
tion. The Church stands for the assimilating power exerted 
by the social group over its members. The same influence 
which a semicriminal gang exerts over a boy for evil is 
exerted by the Church for good. The advice in the Gospel 
to win an offending brother back by pleading with him 
first alone, then drawing two or three others into it, and 
finally bringing the matter before the Church, shows a 
keen insight into the powers of the social group over its 
members. More and more units of power are switched on 
until the current is overpowering.^ 

In a small and simple country or village community 
the Church could follow a man in all his relations. In our 
modern society the social contact of the Church covers 
only a small part of life, and the question is whether the 
influence it exerts on the saved man is strong and contin- 
uous enough to keep him saved. Suppose a poor ^'bum'' 
leaves the Salvation Army barracks with a new Hght of 
hope in his eyes. He passes out on the streets among 
saloons and gambling dens, among sights and sounds and 
smells that call to his passions, among men and women who 
are not part of the saving Kingdom of God, but of the carniv- 
orous kingdom of the devil. So the poor fellow back- 
slides. Suppose a millionaire has been at a meeting where 
he has caught a vision of a new order of business, in which 

^ Begbie's "Twice-Born Men," which has been a summons to personal 
work, proves throughout that salvation comes by social contact with reli- 
gious groups. 2 Matt, xviii. 15-20. 



ii6 



CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



men are not boozy with profits, but in which such as he 
might be brothers to all. Next morning stocks are tum- 
bling on 'Change, and profit is calling to him. So the poor 
fellow backslides. The churches do save men, but so many 
of them do not stay saved. Even in very active churches 
an enormous percentage of members are in the long run 
swept back so that all can see the failure, and if love of 
money and the hardness of social pride were properly 
reckoned as a religious collapse, the percentage of waste 
would be still greater.^ The social organism of the Church 
becomes increasingly unable in modern life to supply the 
social forces of salvation single-handed. It may save, but 
its salvation is neither complete nor durable. 

Sin is a social force. It runs from man to man along 
the lines of social contact. Its impact on the individual 
becomes most overwhelming when sin is most completely 
socialized. Salvation, too, is a social force. It is exerted 
by groups that are charged with divine will and love. It 
becomes durable and complete in the measure in which 
the individual is built into a social organism that is ruled 
by justice, cleanness, and love. A full salvation demands a 
Christian social order which will serve as the spiritual 
environment of the individual. In the little catechism 
which Luther wrote for the comnaon people he has a charm- 
ingly true reply to the question: ^'What is ^our daily 
bread'?" He says: ''All that belongs to the nourish- 
ment and need of our body, meat and drink, clothes and 
shoes, house and home, field and cattle, money and property, 
a good wife and good children, good servants and good 
rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, 
education, honor, good friends, trusty neighbors, and such 
Kke." Yes, especially ''such Hke." In the same way 

1 The General Conference of the Methodist Church and the General 
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 191 2 confronted the tremendous 
losses by the "dropping" of members as one of the most serious questions 
of church life. 



ti 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION I17 

'^salvation" involves a saved environment. For a baby- 
it means the breast and heart and love of a mother, and a 
father who can keep the mother in proper condition. For 
a workingman salvation includes a happy home, clean 
neighbors, a steady job, eight hours a day, a boss that 
treats him as a man, a labor union that is well led, the 
sense of doing his own best work and not being used up to 
give others money to burn, faith in God and in the final 
triumph and present power of the right, a sense of being 
part of a movement that is lifting his class and all man- 
kind, ^^and such Hke." Therefore the conception of 
salvation which is contained in the word ^^the Kingdom of 
God" is a truer and completer conception than that which 
is contained in the word ^^justification by faith," as surely 
as the whole is better than a part. 

I set out with the proposition that social Christianity, 
which makes the Reign of God on earth its object, is a 
distinct type of personal religion, and that in its best mani- 
festations it involves the possibiHty of a purer spirituaKty, 
a keener recognition of sin, more durable powers of growth, 
a more personal evangeHsm, and a more all-around sal- 
vation than the individualistic type of rehgion which makes 
the salvation of the soul its object. I want to add that 
this new type of rehgion is especially adapted to win and 
inspire modern men.^ 

It must be plain to any thoughtful observer that immense 
numbers of men are turning away from traditional rehgion, 
not because they have lapsed into sin, but because they 
have become modernized in their knowledge and points of 

^ In the following pages I am deeply indebted to the inaugural address of 
Leonhard Ragaz, ''Zur gegenwartigen Umgestaltung des Christentums," 
published in Neue Wege, Basel, October, 1909. Professor Ragaz is one of 
the most brilliant preachers of Switzerland, professor of systematic theology 
in the University of Zurich, together with Kutter one of the most eminent 
leaders of Christian Socialism in Switzerland, and all together one of the finest 
examples of the new type of Social Christianity that I have met. 



Il8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

view. Religion itself is an eternal need of humanity, but 
any given form of religion may become antiquated and in- 
adequate, leaving the youngest and livest minds unsatisfied, 
or even repelling where it ought to attract. The real 
religious leaders of this generation must face the problem 
how they can give to modern men the inestimable boon of 
experiencing God as a joy and a power, and of living in 
him as their fathers did. I claim that social Christianity 
is by all tokens the great highway by which this present 
generation can come to God. 

For one thing, it puts an end to most of the old conflicts 
between rehgion and science. The building of the King- 
dom of God on earth requires surprisingly Uttle dogma 
and speculative theology, and a tremendous quantity of 
holy will and scientific good sense. It does not set up a 
series of propositions which need constant modernizing 
and which repel the most active intellects, but it summons 
all to help in transforming the world into a reign of right- 
eousness, and men of good will are not very far apart on 
that. That kind of religion has no quarrel with science. 
It needs science to interpret the universe which Chris- 
tianity wants to transform. Social Christianity sets up 
fewer obstacles for the intellect and puts far heavier tasks 
on the will, and all that is sound in modern life will accept - 
that change with profound relief. 

Social Christianity would also remove one other ob- 
stacle which bars even more men out of religion than the 
scientific difficulties of belief. The most effective argu- 
ment against religion to-day is that religion has been 
^'against the people." The people are coming to their own 
at last. For a century and a half at least they have been on 
the upgrade, climbing with inexpressible toil and suffering 
toward freedom, equality, and brotherhood. The spirit 
of Christ has been their most powerful ally, but the official 
Church, taking Christendom as a whole, has thrown the 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION II 9 

bulk of its great resources to the side of those who are in 
possession, and against those who were in such deadly 
need of its aid. This is the great scandal which will not 
down. Scientific doubt may alienate thousands, but the 
resentment against the Church for going over to the enemy 
has alienated entire nations. Nothing would so expiate 
that guilt and win back the lost respect for religion, as 
determined cooperation on the part of the Church in creat- 
ing a social order in which the just aspirations of the work- 
ing class will be satisfied. Those Christian men who are 
the outstanding and bold friends of the people's cause are 
to-day the most effective apologists of Christianity. 

The Christian demand for the Kingdom of God on earth 
responds to the passionate desire for liberty which pervades 
and inspires the modern world. That desire is really a 
longing for redemption. Just as an individual may long 
to be free from vicious habits that enslave him and rob him 
of his manhood and self-respect, so great social classes now 
want freedom from the social unfreedom and degradation 
which denies their human worth and submerges their higher 
nature in coarseness, ignorance, and animal brutality. The 
theological word ^^ redemption '^ originally meant the ran- 
soming of slaves and prisoners. Christ is the great eman- 
cipator. Every advance in true Christianity has meant 
a broadening path for liberty. The highest Christian 
quality is love; but love is supreme freedom, a state in 
which even moral compulsion ceases because goodness has 
become spontaneous. This world-wide desire for freedom 
is the breath of God in the soul of humanity. Men in- 
stinctively know it as such, and they hate a Church that 
would Tob them of it. Social Christianity would rally 
that desire in the name of the Kingdom of God, and help 
the people to a consciousness that they are really moved by 
religion when they love freedom. On the other hand, by 
its strong emphasis on social solidarity and the law of 



I20 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

service, it will counteract that exaggerated assertion of 
individual rights and that selfish soul- culture which dog 
the steps of Freedom. 

Every individual reconstructs his comprehension of life 
and duty, of the world and of God, as he passes from one 
period of his development to the next. If he fails to do so, 
his religion will lose its grasp and control. In the same way 
humanity must reconstruct its moral and religious syn- 
thesis whenever it passes from one era to another. When 
all other departments of life and thought are silently chang- 
ing, it is impossible for religion to remain unaffected. 
Other-worldly religion was the full expression of the highest 
aspirations of ancient and medieval life. Contemporary 
philosophy supported it. The Ptolemaic astronomy made 
it easy to conceive of a heaven localized above the starry 
firmament, which was only a few miles up. But to-day the 
whole Weltanschauung which supported those religious con- 
ceptions has melted away irretrievably. Copernican as- 
tronomy, the conviction of the universal and majestic reign 
of law, the evolutionary conception of the history of this 
earth and of the race, have made the religious ideas that 
were the natural denizens of the old world of thought 
seem like antique survivals to-day, as if a company of 
Athenians should walk down Broadway in their ancient 
dress. When Christianity invaded the ancient world, it 
was a modernist religion contemptuously elbowing aside 
the worn-out superstitions of heathenism, and the live 
intellects seized it as an adequate expression of their reli- 
gious consciousness. To-day the livest intellects have the 
greatest difficulty in maintaining their connection with it. 
Many of its defenders are querulously lamenting the growth 
of unbelief. They stand on a narrowing island amid a 
growing flood, saving what they can of the wreckage of 
faith. Is religion dying? Is the giant faith of Chris- 
tianity tottering to its grave ? 



SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY AND PERSONAL RELIGION 121 

Religion is not dying. It is only molting its feathers, 
as every winged thing must at times. A new springtide 
is coming. Even now the air is full of mating calls and 
love songs. Soon there will be a nest in every tree. 

As the modern world is finding itself, religion is return- 
ing to it in new ways. Philosophy in its most modern forms 
is tending toward an idealistic conception of the universe, 
even when it calls itself materiahstic. It realizes spirit 
behind all reality. The new psychology is full of the 
powers and mysteries of the soul. It is no slight achieve- 
ment of faith to think of God immanent in the whole vast 
universe, but those who accomplish that act of faith feel him 
very near and mysteriously present, pulsating in their 
own souls in every yearning for truth and love and right. 
Life once more becomes miraculous; for every event in 
which we realize God and our soul is a miracle. All his- 
tory becomes the unfolding of the purpose of the immanent 
God who is working in the race toward the commonwealth 
of spiritual liberty and righteousness. History is the 
sacred workshop of God. There is a presentiment abroad 
in modern thought that humanity is on the verge of a pro- 
found change, and that feeling heralds the fact. We feel 
that all this wonderful liberation of redemptive energy is 
working out a true and divine order in which our race will 
rise to a new level of existence. But such a higher order 
can rise out of the present only if superior spiritual forces 
build and weave it. Thousands of young minds who 
thought a few years ago that they had turned their back on 
religion forever are full of awe and a sense of mystery as 
they watch the actuahties of Hfe in this process of upbuild- 
ing.^ By cooperating with God in his work they are 
realizing God. Religion is insuppressible. 

^This line of thought was worked out more fully by me in a sermon 
preached before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, J912, 
and in a little book, "Unto Me," published by the Pilgrim Press, Boston, 
1912. 



122 



CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



It is true that the social enthusiasm is an unsettUng force 
which may unbalance for a time, break old religious habits 
and connections, and establish new contacts that are a 
permanent danger to personal religion. But the way to 
meet this danger is not to fence out the new social spirit, 
but to let it fuse with .the old religious faith and create a 
new total that will be completer and more Christian than 
the old religious individualism at its best. Such a combina- 
tion brings a triumphant enlargement of life which proves 
its own value and which none would give up again who 
has once experienced it. There is so much religion even 
in nonreligious social work that some who had lost their 
conscious religion irretrievably have found it again by this 
new avenue. God has met them while they were at work 
with him in social redemption, and they have a religion 
again and a call to a divine ministry. Faith in a new social 
order is so powerful a breeder of religion that great bodies 
of men who in theory scorn and repudiate the name of 
religion, in practice show evidence of possessing some of 
the most powerful instincts and motives of religion.^ One 
of the most valuable achievements in the domain of per- 
sonal religion which is now open to any man is to build up 
a rounded and harmonious Christian personality in which 
all the sweetness and intensity of the old religious Hfe 
shall combine with the breadth, intelligence, and fighting 
vigor of the social spirit. Every such individuality will 
reproduce itself in others who are less mature, and so mul- 
tiply this new species of the genus 'Christian." 

^ This is the message of the briUiant book of Kutter of Zurich, " Sie 
miissen," which has been edited in English by Rufus W. Weeks, and pub- 
lished by the Cooperative Printing Company, Chicago. Richard Heath 
has summed up all the teachings of Kutter in "Social Democracy : Does it 
Mean Darkness or Light?" Letchworth, England, 1910. 



PART III 

"OUR SEMI-CHRISTIAN SOCIAL 
ORDER" 

CHAPTER I 

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ^'CHRISTIANIZING THE 
SOCIAL order''? 

We often hear the assertion that no one can tell whether 
Christianity would work, because Christianity has never 
been tried. 

I deny it. Christianity has been tried, both in private 
and in social Hfe, and the question is in order whether 
anything in the history of humanity has succeeded except 
Christianity. 

It is true enough that there has never been a social order 
which was Christian from top to bottom. But large do- 
mains of our social Hfe have come under the sway of Christ's 
law in their spirit and in their fundamental structure, and 
these are by common consent the source of our happiness 
and the objects of our pride, while those portions of the 
social order which are still unchristianized are the source 
of our misery and the cause of our shame. 

It is unjust to Christianity to call our civilization Chris- 
tian ; it is unjust to our civilization to call it unchristian. 
It is semi-christian. Its regeneration is in process, but it 
has run in streaks and strata, with baffling inconsistencies 
and hypocrisies, even as with you and me. But so far as 
the process has gone, it will warrant us in taking the com- 

123 



124 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

pletion of the job in hand with serene confidence that it 
will work. Christian history is not a dismal failure to date. 
The largest and hardest part of the work of christianizing 
the social order has been done. 

In the next chapter I shall try to show how the Christian 
portions of our social order were christianized. This will 
furnish us a working conception of the means by which the 
unregenerate parts can be put through the same saving 
process. In several subsequent chapters I shall then 
analyze the unchristianized portions of the social order in 
order to make clear why and in what respects they are still 
unchristian. 

But first we shall have to define what we mean by '' chris- 
tianizing" the social order or any part of it. 

I do not mean putting the name of Christ into the Con- 
stitution of the United States. Some descendants of the 
Scotch Covenanters still refuse to vote or hold office under 
our government because Jesus Christ is not formally 
acknowledged as the head of our nation. But in the pres- 
ent stage of our life that would only be one more act of 
national hypocrisy. Moreover Jesus himself does not seem 
to have cared much about being called ^^Lord, Lord/' 
unless there was substance to the word. To put a stop to 
child labor in our country would be a more effective way 
of doing homage to his sovereignty than any business of 
words and names. 

Neither do we want to renew the attempts made in the 
past by both Catholicisrn and Protestantism to set up a 
theocracy ruled by the Church and making Christian be- 
lief and worship a compulsory duty of citizenship. All 
the experience of history protests against coercion in re- 
ligion. The small amount of compulsion still surviving in 
the established churches of Europe and South America 
is felt by outsiders to be a relic of past evil and a present- 
day scandal. 



MEANING OF CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 12 5 

Christianizing the social order means bringing it into har- 
mony with the ethical convictions which we identify with 
Christ. A fairly definite body of moral convictions has 
taken shape in modern humanity. They express our col- 
lective conscience, our working reUgion. The present so- 
cial order denies and flouts many of these principles of our 
ethical life and compels us in practice to outrage our better 
self. We demand therefore that the moral sense of hu- 
manity shall be put in control and shall be allowed to re- 
shape the institutions of social life. 

We call this ^^christianizing'' the social order because 
these moral principles find their highest expression in the 
teachings, the life, and the spirit of Jesus Christ. Their 
present power in Western civilization is in large part di- 
rectly traceable to his influence over its history. To the 
great majority of our nation, both inside and outside of 
the churches, he has become the incarnate moral law and 
his name is synonymous with the ideal of human goodness. 
To us who regard him as the unique revelation of God, the 
unfolding of the divine life under human forms, he is the 
ultimate standard of moral and spiritual life, the perfect 
expression of the will of God for humanity, the categorical 
imperative with a human heart. But very many who do 
not hold this belief in a formulated way or who feel com- 
pelled to deny it, including an increasing portion of our 
Jewish fellow-citizens, will still consent that in Jesus our 
race has reached one of its highest points, if not its crowning 
summit thus far, so that Jesus Christ is a prophecy of the 
future glory of humanity, the type of Man as he is to be. 
Christianizing means humanizing in the highest sense. 
I ask the consent of both classes to use his name for the 
undertaking which he initiated for us. To say that we 
want to moraHze the social order would be both vague and 
powerless to most men. To say that we want to chris- 
tianize it is both concrete and compelling. Christ's spirit 



/ 



126 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL OEJDER 

is the force that drives us. His mind is the square and 
plumb Hne that must guide us in our building. 

The danger in using so high a word is that we shall be led 
to expect too much: Even a Christian social order cannot 
mean perfection. As long as men are flesh and blood the 
world can be neither sinless nor painless. For instance, 
how can any form of social organization keep the tremen- 
dous electric current of sex desire from going astray and 
dealing misery and shame ? The law of growth, which is 
essential to human life, itself makes any static perfection 
impossible. Every child is born a kicking little egotist and 
has to learn by its own mistakes and sins to coordinate 
itself with the social life of every successive group which 
it enters. If perfection were reached to-day, new adjust- 
ments would be demanded to-morrow by the growth of 
new powers. The justest and most sympathetic human 
society conceivable would unknowingly inflict injury and 
wrong, and only slowly realize it when it heard the insistent 
cry of pain. The structure of society can never be up to 
date. It is necessarily a slow historical growth, and men 
will always have to labor hard to rid it of antiquated and 
harmful customs and institutions brought down from a 
worse past. 

I must ask my readers to keep these limitations of human 
life in mind as axioms in all the discussion that follows, 
even when they are not stated, and to assume that we are 
keeping within hailing distance of common sense. We 
shall demand perfection and never expect to get it. But 
by demanding it we shall get more than we now have. 
Straight-cut insistence on moral duty is quite compatible 
with the largest patience, as human frailty limps up to 
God's judgment seat and pleads guilty for a thousand sins. 
Jesus is the classical example of the combination between 
high-voltage moral demand and the tenderest under- 
standing. 



MEANING OF CHRISTIANIZING^ THE SOCIAL ORDER 1 27 

But within the Kmitations of human nature I believe 
that the constitutional structure of the social order can be 
squared with the demands of Christian morality. At every 
new step of moral progress the clamor has gone up that 
fairness and decency were Utopian fanaticism and would 
ruin society, but instead of making the social machinery 
unworkable, every step toward collective Christian ethics 
proved an immense rehef to society. 

An unchristian social order can be known by the fact 
that it makes good men do bad things. It tempts, defeats, 
drains, and degrades, and leaves men stunted, cowed, and 
shamed in their manhood. A Christian social order makes 
bad men do good things. It sets high aims, steadies the 
vagrant impulses of the weak, trains the powers of the 
young, and is felt by all as an uplifting force which leaves 
them with the consciousness of a broader and nobler hu- 
manity as their years go on. 

Having now explained what we mean by christianizing 
the social order, we might draw from the Gospels a list of 
the Christian principles of social life and test the existing 
social order by them. But we shall find it more fruitful 
to trace the moral evolution of those social institutions which 
have to some degree been christianized and in this way 
amplify our conceptions of the christianizing process. 
History will give us a better comprehension of the problem 
than the closest definition of terms. If we know how a 
thing has been done, we see how it can and ought to be 
done. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 

The simplest and most familiar social organization is 
the family. It is also the most Christian. It is so Christian 
that the word ^^ Father" has become the most satisfactory- 
symbol of a loving God, and the word ^' child" the most 
trustful expression of our relation to him. When Jesus 
substituted these family terms for the old royal concep- 
tions with their connotations of despotism, the change 
meant a redemption of religion.^ Wherever the members 
of a social organization have taken to calling one another 
^'brother," it has stood for higher social ideals. '^The 
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" is one of 
the cherished phrases of our time; it expresses the faith 
that the same solidarity and tenderness which we know in 
family life will yet become common in our wider social 
relations. As for the word ^^mother" — that carries a 
mystic breath of religious sweetness to which we all do 
homage. Thus the social institution of the family is so 
Christian that we can use all its terms freely as symbols 
and vehicles of spiritual thought and feeling. Could we do 
the same with the terms of business life, ^^boss/' ^^ hands/' 
^^ foreman," ^^ clerk"? 

The cheering fact about this is that the family did not 
set out with so much love and beauty, but had to go through 

^ Note PauFs sense of relief when he contrasted the spirit of the old reli- 
gions with the spirit prevaiHng in Christianity. When you became Chris- 
tians, "you did not receive a slavish spirit so that you had to be afraid 
again, but you received a filial spirit which impels us to cry out, Abba, 
Father!" Romans viii. 15. 

128 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 29 

a long, sanctifying process. In its early stages the patri- 
archal family from which our own family organization is 
derived was held together by stern force and selfishness, 
quite as much as by love and kinship. The slaves and serv- 
ants were worked and ruled for the good of the owner and 
master, and however kind a man he might be, the whip was 
a matter of course and the infliction of death was his right. 
Wives were dragged off as the booty of war, or purchased. 
They represented sex desire and love, but also labor force 
and the breeding of children. A patriarch with a lot of 
wives was a capitalist and became rich on the ^^ surplus 
value'' they created for him. His sons were his fighting 
outfit with which he gained and protected his wealth and 
power. Around the hall of Priam were fifty apartments 
for his sons and their wives, and the prowess of the young 
men was the constitutional basis of his kingship. 
Daughters too were capital, and beauty might prove a 
bonanza. When Jacob fled from Esau and fell in love with 
Rachel at the well, he had no cattle or jewelry to buy her, 
so he bound himself to work for Laban seven years. Since 
his children were born in Laban's family, that excellent 
business man claimed them as his unearned increment, 
and felt as sore as an outraged landlord when Jacob finally 
made off with them all. The old gentleman felt a con- 
scious glow of virtue when he let them go unscathed.^ 

The Ufe and welfare of every member of the patriarchal 
family were controlled by its head. He was their economic 
manager, directing their work, allotting their goods, and 
selling the common product to his own advantage. They 
took their religion from him as the household priest. He 
was ruler and judge over his own, and law and custom up- 
held his despotic power, for the law was made and the prece- 
dents were set by him and his peers. He could divorce his 

^ Genesis xxxi. The whole story is very interesting material for the early 
history of the family, 
K 



130 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

wife or bring in other women to share her most precious 
rights. If she was unfaithful, he could kill her. She had 
no corresponding claim on his fidehty, for it was his right 
to do as he hked. Over his children too he held the power 
of life and death. The practice of exposing crippled or 
female children, which still exists in some nonchristian 
nations, is merely a remnant of larger powers in the past. 
The Romans were proud that the patria potestas was no- 
where more absolute than with them. 

This despotic family organization contained very large 
ingredients of good. It furnished the weak protection 
against enslavement and death. It coerced the savage to 
work, sweated the idleness out of him, and made his labor 
more productive by forcing him into cooperation with 
others. It placed the capable in the position of leadership, 
and killed them off when they failed. To expand a family 
of two into a patriarchal tribe of fifty or five hundred, to 
keep sons and slaves together, to beat off hostile competi- 
tion and attack, and beat down domestic intrigues and 
conspiracies, was quite as great a feat of leadership then as 
to organize a department store or a trust nowadays. The 
patriarchal family in its tyrannous beginnings can claim 
the gratitude of posterity with the same right as our present 
industrial organization. For thousands of years it was 
the social system within which the larger part of the race 
found food and protection, education and religion. 

Nevertheless the fact remains that the family as an in- 
stitution was based on despotism and exploitation. The 
relation of husband and wives, of father and children, of 
master and slaves, could be made fine and noble by personal 
goodness, but the personal virtue was constantly vitiated 
by the wrong inhering in the social order in which they 
hved. The Old Testament gives us an intimate insight 
into a number of families, either as they actually lived, or 
as the admiring and idealizing tradition of later times imag- 



H 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 131 

ined them, and not one of them shows us a good home from 
a modern point of view. Abraham was a true gentleman, 
whose acquaintance would be a benediction in any civiliza- 
tion ; Jacob would surely be a millionaire and church elder 
if he lived to-day ; David is one of the most brilliant and 
spiritual figures in history. Yet the family relations of 
these mert were such that no self-respecting church could 
retain them as members if they did the same to-day. An 
unregenerate social institution put these good men into 
positions where they did wrong. We see them now as 
posterity will see our Christian business men. 

The history of the family tells of a slow decrease of 
despotism and exploitation. Gradually wives were no 
longer bought outright. The right of divorce was hedged 
about. The wife gained an assured legal status and some 
property rights. When polygamy ceased and adultery 
was considered a crime in man as well as in woman, the 
basis was laid for equality between man and wife. But 
only within the last hundred years has woman risen toward 
acknowledged equahty with swift and decisive steps. Most 
other countries are still far from conceding what our Ameri- 
can women have now learned to take as a matter of course. 
The present agitation for woman's suffrage is one of the 
final steps of this ascent. The suffrage will abolish one of 
the last remnants of patriarchal autocracy by giving woman 
a direct relation to the political organism of society, in- 
stead of allowing man to exercise her political rights for 
her. 

In the same way the relation of the father to the children 
became less autocratic and more lo\dng. The killing of 
a child by the father became rare, then illegal, and finally 
a crime. Marrying off his daughters has ceased to be a 
lucrative business and has become an expensive joy. In- 
stead of exploiting the children for his own enrichment the 
father has learned to sacrifice himself for their education 



132 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

and advancement. Changes in the legal status of children 
have followed the change in family feeling. Here again 
the course of evolution has come to a swift culmination. 
Our own generation has witnessed a remarkable advance 
toward democracy in the relation between parents and 
children. 

Imagine that a Syrian village had fallen asleep in the 
year 4000 B.C., like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty in 
the old fairy tale, and were waked to life to-day. The 
elders in the village gate resume their discussion of current 
affairs, — of the slave who has run away to escape a beat- 
ing ; of the ten sons of a neighboring sheik who conspired 
to kill their father and take his slaves and harem to set up 
for themselves; and of the sad poisoning of a favorite 
wife's son by some other wife ^^to this jury unknown/' 
The elders agree that a pernicious social unrest is abroad 
which makes their life a burden and threatens the founda- 
tions of civilization. To them enters a modern tourist, 
pastor in a staid Pennsylvania town, a man who prides 
himself on being untainted by radical social notions. As he 
listens to tlieir woes, he promptly sees the cause and ex- 
pounds the orthodox American conception of the family, 
advising them to treat their wives as their equals, to live 
for their children, and to give their servants one night off 
per week. They listen to the stranger with patient courtesy 
at first, explaining that his views are Utopian; that all 
authority would be undermined if a man could not beat his 
wife; that the women like being beaten, and would take 
it as a sign of diminishing affection if they were no longer 
chastised; that polygamy is an index of high morality, 
since the best citizens have most wives, and you would 
have to change human nature to make monogamy com- 
pulsory; that slaves would have nothing to eat if they 
had no masters to feed and employ them; that theology 
rightly teaches that a father, being the author of a child's 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 33 

life, has a right to take its Ufe if he considers it superfluous. 
The American, aglow with Christian indignation, describes 
how wisely his wife manages the common finances and se- 
lects his neck-ties ; how he sends his girls to Vassar, though 
it ruins his bank account ; how fond the girls are of their 
dad, and how he would hate himself if he thought that his 
family regarded him as a tyrant. But he sees dark frowns 
gathering on their faces and ominous whispers running 
about. He pales as he hears the ancient Hittite equiva- 
lent for ^^ socialist and anarchist'' applied to himself. The 
scene is full of tragic possibihties, and we abandon the 
unhappy extremist to the imagination of the reader. 

Doubtless the head of a patriarchal family, if he could 
have foreseen the later democratizing of the institution, 
would have felt that while wife and child might gain, the 
father would certainly lose by the change. Yet in fact 
the father too has gained. He has lost in power, but gained 
in love. In the beginning children seem to have formed a 
permanent attachment only for the mother. When the 
father ceased to be a tyrant, he won his share of love. 

Thus the constitutional structure of the family has 
passed through an ethical transformation by slow historical 
processes. The despotism of the man, fortified by law, 
custom, and economic possession, has passed into approxi- 
mate equality between husband and wife. The children 
have become the free companions of their parents, and 
selfish parental authority has come under the law of unself- 
ish service. Economic exploitation by the head of the 
family has been superseded by economic cooperation and a 
satisfactory communism of the family equipment. Based 
on equal rights, bound together by love and respect for 
individuahty, governed under the law of mutual helpful- 
ness, the family to-day furnishes the natural habitation 
for a Christian Hfe and fellowship. There is no confhct 
of the Christian spirit with the accepted laws of family 



134 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



life; only with the transgressions of those laws. We can 
therefore say that the family has been assimilated to Chris- 
tianity. As an institution it has been christianized. 

That does not, however, mean that Christian living has 
become automatic in the family and requires no religious 
effort. To make the family a place of permanent love, 
peace, and spiritual beauty is now, and always will be, a 
great moral achievement and one of the highest triumphs 
of personality. The number of really beautiful families 
is still small. Yet the traditions of the institution, as 
religion, custom, public opinion, law, and neighborhood 
example have shaped it, make it an ennobling and restrain- 
ing force in the life of all. The despotic and polygamous 
family life of the past caused saints to do shameful things. 
The christianized family holds even selfish and wayward 
individuals to some measure of decency, serviceableness, 
and love. The fact that the institution as such has been 
christianized predisposes the individuals living in it to be 
Christians. If they are personally temperate, reasonable, 
loving, and swayed by religious convictions and duties, 
they will find the family responsive to their highest desires ; 
if they are not, they will at least find it a restraining, edu- 
cational, and discipHnary influence. 

The process through which the family has been trans- 
formed can justly be called a christianizing process, not 
only in view of the results achieved, but of the forces that 
accomplished the results. So far as the Graeco-Roman 
world is concerned, Christianity saved and regenerated the 
institution of the family just as much as it ever saved any 
sinner. Among the wealthy classes of the ancient world 
marriage had reached a stage of decomposition compared 
with which the divorce scandals of some of our millionaires 
seem decorous, and, as usual, the upper classes infected 
the lower with their bacteria. The young Christian Church 
attacked the sexual evils of heathen society, its prostitu- 



11 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER I35 

tion, concubinage, ease of divorce, and unnatural vices 
with the same convinced ardor with which sociahsts smite 
our industrial vices, and in the degree in which the Church 
gained spiritual control, it cemented the family with new 
religious sanctions, made it once more permanent, and filled 
it with higher meanings and values. However dereUct the 
Church has been about other social relations, it has always 
been deeply concerned in the family. It has often taken 
reactionary positions, for instance, about the public activi- 
ties and the emancipation of women, but it has always stood 
for fidelity, cleanness, and tenderness. 

Moreover, the influence of the Christian spirit on the 
home life has been more searching and intimate than 
mere church influence. It did its work within the four 
walls of innumerable homes, unrecorded by public observa- 
tion, and the actors in the readjustments were not aware 
that they were sharing in a great social transformation. 
If any one will pass in review the families he has known in- 
timately, he will realize that religion is often the decisive 
factor in the character of a home. If we go through a 
tenement house full of slovenly, quarrelsome, and dis- 
couraged famihes, and find one home which seems an oasis 
of cleanKness, order, and peace, we shall be safe in assuming 
that we have struck a religious family. But every chris- 
tianized family leaves traditions in the hearts of its chil- 
dren which they will seek to realize in their own homes, 
and it sets the standard a little higher for all who come in 
contact with it. By such precedents pubHc opinion and 
custom are formed, and ultimately law follows custom. So 
the ethical transformation of the family becomes compre- 
hensible only through the persistent atmospheric pressure 
of Christianity exerted on countless famihes through many 
generations. We can watch its swift decay to-cfay wherever 
the influence of Christianity has lapsed. 

On the other hand, religion did not do the work single- 



136 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

handed. Social and economic changes did their part. 
For instance, the suppression of polygamy was helped by 
the cessation of slavery. The home became a place of 
rest and love when household production changed to joint 
labor in the shop a^d factory, relieving the family of the 
coercion of productive toil. Religion always does its most 
powerful and permanent social work when it supports and 
invigorates the wholesome tendencies in the common life 
of men. 

To-day this christianized family is being attacked by 
new disintegrating forces against which it is all the more 
defenseless because it now rests so exclusively on the finer 
and more fragile moral instincts. High rents in the cities 
narrow the home and crush its charms. High prices and 
high standards of living combine to make family life ex- 
pensive and to suppress child life. IndustriaHsm is empty- 
ing the home of its women folk. A theory of education 
which imposes no law except the law of pleasurableness 
on the young is sapping the virtues of self-restraint and 
patience. The materialistic spirit developed by modern 
commercialism is weakening the organization of the spiritual 
life, the Church, and therewith the power of organized 
religion over the home is failing. Unless these destructive 
forces are checked in this generation, the institution of the 
family will have been christianized only to perish Hke a flower 
in full bloom bitten by frost. Unless the rest of society is 
christianized, the christianized family cannot survive in it.^ 

A similar christianizing process has taken place in the 
Church, which is the social organization of the religious 
life of humanity. 

At the beginning of the modern era the Church was a 
despotic and exploiting organization. Instead of being 
the great exemplar of fraternity, it was ruled by a monar- 



^ Some of these causes of decadence have been discussed more fully in 
Christianity and the Social Crisis," pp. 271-279. 



I 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 37 

chical and aristocratic hierarchy, which used its immense 
powers to lord it over the people and to enrich itself. 
Though founded on the principle of love and freedom, it 
coerced belief and terrorized men into uniformity by physi- 
cal constraint. But coercion is in reHgion what rape is in 
love. The Church owned nearly a third of the landed 
wealth of Europe, and in addition to its rents extorted tithes 
and fees, by civil process. It had commerciaHzed heaven, 
hell, and purgatory, and did a thriving business in assorted 
rehgious commodities. Because many of its positions were 
rich sinecures, they were bestowed on favorites, granted 
for a rake-off, and often held by absentees, while hungry 
vicars did the actual work. Every effort to reform the 
Church before the Reformation turned, not, as we would 
suppose, on the restoration of evangeHcal doctrine, but 
on the abatement of simony, which was the ecclesiastical 
term for what we call ^' graft." A hundred years before 
Luther all the best minds of Europe were exerting them- 
selves to reform the Church ^^in head and members," an 
equivalent of our efforts to get at ^Hhose higher up" in 
political corruption. Three international councils were con- 
vened in rapid succession and sat for years, but the net 
outcome for decency was slight. The ecclesiastical Tam- 
many Hall was able to counter every move. The forces 
of corruption were so solidly intrenched and the forces 
of moral indignation were so carefully gagged, that even 
the almost universal condemnation of all honorable men 
was unable to work a permanent change. Instead of being 
a great, free, mobile force available to work righteousness, 
the Church was itself the chief object of contempt and 
reform. Scientific Catholic historians to-day agree in 
confessing the practical abuses prevaiHng, and they would 
be less guarded in their condemnation of them if Protestants 
did not point to this degradation of the Church to justify 
the terrible spHt of the Reformation. 



138 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

If any one in the year 1500 had prophesied that the time 
would come when the type of the lazy and fat-bellied priest 
would disappear from literature and the stage, and when 
the ministry of the Church would be wholly free from any 
charge of general sexual impurity ; when the Church itself 
would be without governmental powers, without legal 
privileges, without power to collect its tithes and execute 
its verdicts by the aid of the State, without endowed wealth, 
and depending entirely for support on the free gifts of those 
who loved her; when corruption and graft would be un- 
known and impossible in church life, and ministers, with 
few exceptions, would be sincere and hard-working men ; 
when any attempt to repress or force religious belief would 
arouse general condemnation and every man would be 
free to follow the inner light, — if any one had prophesied 
all this, it would have been read as a delightful Utopian 
dream, and very likely the Church would have suppressed 
the book. 

Yet that is the condition actually attained in our coun- 
try. Our ministers as a class are a clean, laborious, and 
honorable profession. They are anxious to serve the 
community, and do so according to their best light, even 
when they derive no tangible benefit whatever. If there 
is any graft in the ministry, it is the graft practiced by the 
churches in underpaying their pastors, using their wives 
as unpaid workers, and turning them off on a pittance or 
on nothing when the magnetism of youth has been worked 
out of them. That is graft, but the old graft reversed. 
The Church itself is almost without special privilege except 
the tax exemption which it shares with other benevolent 
organizations. Very few churches have any endowment; 
they all Hve from hand to mouth, and rejoice when they 
end a year without debt. In all the criticism of the Church 
to-day is there any charge that the Church is doing con- 
scious and positive wrong? The substance of all charges 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OE OUR SOCIAL ORDER 139 

is that it fails to rise to its highest opportunities. May 
none of us have a blacker mark than that when we stand 
at the judgment bar ! 

All this means that the Church has become a Christian. 
It was christianized when it got rid of its elaborate and profit- 
able superstitions, and made salvation both simple and free. 
It was christianized when it lost its power and its will to 
tyrannize. Some Protestant churches have entirely demo- 
cratized their organization; others, which have retained 
a monarchical or aristocratic form of organization in our 
country, have at least been steeped in the democratic spirit. 
The clergy was christianized when it lost the opportunity 
to live on easy money and learned to do hard work for plain 
pay. The Church is hated to-day only in countries where 
it suppresses rehgious and intellectual freedom and resists 
the moral aspirations of the people. It is loved where it 
is a cooperative organization, resting on a basis of Uberty 
and equality, held together by good will, and serving the 
highest ends known to the people. Let no one say that the 
churches of our country are not loved. What other nation- 
wide organization is there which is supported freely by the 
people with such an output of money and of voluntary serv- 
ice, and which can offer them so little in return in the way 
of financial help or of pleasurable excitement ? Why do the 
people do it if they do not love their churches ? 

For centuries before the Reformation the instinct of 
Christian men had located the fundamental cause for the 
corruption of the Church. It was a common conviction 
that the debasement of the Church had set in with the 
^'Donation of Constantine,'' by which the Emperor Con- 
stantine was supposed to have conferred large territories 
and sovereign rights on Pope Sylvester in the fourth cen- 
tury. That had been ^'the poisoned bone which the devil 
had thrown and which the Church had swallowed." Since 
then the Church has become an antichristian power. 



I40 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Constantly the bolder reformatory spirits taught that the 
Church could be saved only by surrendering its wealth and 
political power and returning to apostolic poverty, sup- 
ported only by the free gifts of those who loved her. And 
that has, in fact, been the way by which the salvation of the 
Church has come. Church historians have overestimated 
the purifying influence of Luther's and Calvin's doctrine, 
and underestimated the tremendous fact that in conse- 
quence of the terrible punishment of the social and political 
changes accompanying the Reformation, the power of the 
Church to tyrannize and exploit was stopped, and rent 
and profit began to disappear from church life. That took 
the Church out of the captivity of Mammon, and brought 
her back to God and the people. 

The Church did not welcome its salvation. When the 
princes of the Church lost their temporal sovereignty; 
when the property of the Church was '^secularized" ; when 
the constitutionalized ^^puU" and graft of the clerical 
aristocracy was canceled ; the classes affected always felt 
that the cause of religion had received its death blow. Even 
to-day the papacy is not reconciled to the loss of the little 
State which had given the Pope the status of a sovereign 
prince, and even American CathoHcs feel compelled to 
demand the restoration of the papal sovereignty in order to 
enable the papacy to get back into the game of international 
politics which has always been so ruinous to the spiritual 
power of the papal institution. The process by which the 
Church was stripped of power and wealth was no beautiful 
act of self-renunciation, but a shameless hold-up by the 
powers that be. The ruling classes, the princes and aris- 
tocracy,' found the Church ditched with punctured tires 
on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and proceeded to 
help themselves to what Providence had provided, being 
careful to show their governmental badge of authority 
to prove that it was all done legally. Some fractional part 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 141 

was usually devoted to endow education and charity, but 
the bulk of the landed wealth of the Church made the ever- 
lasting fortune of those who were ''on the inside" at the 
time. The despotic power of the Protestant princes was 
also greatly augmented by seizing the ecclesiastical powers 
hitherto exercised by the bishops and the Pope, so that the 
Reformation helped to create the era of absolutism to which 
the French Revolution began to make an end. Yet, in 
spite of its evil side effects, the revolution by which the 
political power and the unearned wealth of the Church were 
fatally broken and started on the way toward extinction 
proved to be the moral salvation of the Church. Wherever 
remnants of the old conditions survive, the Church is under 
the challenge of the modern spirit, and wherever that spirit 
becomes conscious and militant, the Church is distrusted 
and hated as a constitutional foe of truth and liberty. On 
the other hand, wherever the Church has been set free from 
even the chance to tyrannize, it has become a powerful 
member in the alliance of forces that are redeeming the 
social order. 

Here, then, we have another great section of the social 
order which has passed through a moral transformation and 
redemption, still incomplete, but far-reaching and tre- 
mendous. Like the family, the Church was christianized 
by unlearning despotism and exploitation, and coming 
under the law of love and service. Its salvation came, not 
rnerely by multiplying the number of good men in it, while 
leaving the social invitations to tyranny intact ; not merely 
by purifying the Gospel preached, while the clergy continued 
to live abnormal and parasitic lives ; but by stripping the 
Church of its unearned wealth, depriving its leaders of 
special privilege and the food of arrogance, wresting from 
their hands the means of coercion, and making them an- 
swerable to those whom they served and from whom they 
got their hving. When coercion ceased, a purer gospel 



142 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

followed. When the ministry was democratized, Christian 
ethics had a chance. When the official servants of the 
Church stepped out of the classes that fatten on rent and 
profit, and entered the honorable poverty of the wage 
earners, the lust of rule passed into the will to serve. Be- 
cause evil had intrenched itself in the Church and fought 
against betterment, salvation had to come by a disastrous 
revolution which created new evils in place of those which 
it abohshed. It took several centuries of organic develop- 
ment to complete the process, and even now it is not com- 
pleted. But a constitutional change has been wrought 
which amounts to a christianizing of the Church. 

This christianized Church is now, like the christianized 
family, in danger for its very existence. Its financial needs, 
the supply and hopefulness of its ministry, its hold on the 
mass of the working people, its stability in the rural dis- 
tricts, are all threatened by modern conditions.^ Its very 
value is called in question by the materialistic spirit created 
by our commercialism. The poor who are reduced to bar- 
barism by poverty, and the rich whose higher life is drowned 
out by excess, alike stare at the Church with dull and apa- 
thetic eyes. If the income of the Church were big enough for 
graft, there would be solid ^ interests" to fight for it. If it 
could still terrorize the people, it could coerce them into 
attendance, support, and obedience. Because it appeals 
only to the free impulses of a mature spiritual life, it lan- 
guishes where the spiritual life of the nation is atrophied. 
Unless it helps to save and christianize the national life, 
large sections of the Church will wither away, and it will 
survive only in those lower forms which still appeal to super- 
stition, dogmatism, and emotionalism. 

A third section of the social order which has gone through 
a christianizing process is the organization which serves the 
purposes of education. 

1 These points are fully discussed in Chapter VI of " Christianity and the 
Social Crisis." 



I 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 143 

In its unregenerate days education was a perquisite of 
the secular and religious aristocracy. Those famihes and 
classes which had gained leisure and taste for the intellec- 
tual Kfe cultivated and refined it further. But instead of 
being a missionary force which impelled the cultured minds 
to put themselves at the service of the ignorant, it was an 
added influence to put the upper classes out of sympathetic 
contact with the lower. In every aristocratic society the 
possessing class has watched the spread of education down- 
ward with jealousy and has yielded the means for it grudg- 
ingly, reahzing that education breeds unrest and discontent 
and makes the servile and laboring class less respectful 
and dependent. Governor Berkeley voiced the attitude of 
the CavaHers in England and Virginia in his famous report 
of 1670 : ^^I thank God there are no free schools, nor print- 
ing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years ; 
for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects 
into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels 
against the best government. God keep us from both!" 
The prohibition of negro education in some of our slave 
states before the war was simply an extreme expression of 
the unregenerate spirit in education. Even when popular 
education becomes common, the upper classes maintain 
special educational privileges for their children. In Ger- 
many, for instance, there are two sets of government 
schools, even for the very young : one for the children of the 
common people, who expect to go to work as soon as they 
have reached adolescence ; the other for the children of 
parents who can afford to give them a higher and longer 
education. As long as the social order is divided into these 
classes, this is a very practical system, but it neither ex- 
presses nor creates democracy. 

The spirit in which education was imparted was also 
autocratic and even tyrannous. The novels and biogra- 
phies of the early Victorian era are full of the flogging of 



144 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

schoolboys. Corporal punishment was so constant that 
children were under a reign of fear, witness Shakespeare's 
^^ whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning 
face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school/' The final 
escape from school Hfe was often marked by a wild bound 
for liberty. Maturer students too were mentally coerced 
by the authority of the teacher and the great names of 
learning. Freedom and originality in the student were 
regarded with suspicion, and a purely receptive attitude was 
encouraged. In the higher walks of intellectual life free- 
dom of investigation and teaching was always an individual 
conquest, and the yoke of orthodoxy, religious, political, 
and social, lay heavily on the neck of teachers. 

It would be idle to claim that even a single one of these 
evils has been fully outgrown by education. But there has 
been a revolutionary change. Corporal punishment has 
fallen into disuse, and within one generation the reign of 
fear has so far ceased that the majority of children now 
seem to love school. In the higher schools habits of intel- 
lectual freedom are encouraged. Scientific investigation in 
the universities has become almost autonomous. 

Except in private schools patronized by the wealthy, 
manifestations of social exclusiveness call for apology, and 
every advance in democracy is proclaimed with pride. 
The Christian missionary impulse has taken possession of 
the teaching profession and the great organization of edu- 
cation. Institutions eagerly create extension courses and 
implore the intellectually lost to come in and be saved. The 
presence of even a fraction of one per cent of persons who can- 
not read and write is felt as a reproach by civilized nations. 
Individual teachers may be lazy and stale, but the teaching 
profession as a whole is under the law of Christ. It seeks 
to serve, and the road to greatness in it is by preeminent 
service. 

Profit making is not unknown in educational life, but 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 145 

it is limited in scope and always felt to be a degradation. 
Medical schools run for profit, for instance, are inferior 
institutions and often a disgrace to the profession. Com- 
pared with the prizes of business life even the highest 
incomes of teachers are modest. Yet for plain pay men and 
women give faithful and efficient work and take satisfaction 
in doing it. 

The financial support of the public school system is 
always niggardly compared with the real needs, and it has 
often been the nesting place of graft. Nevertheless it is 
on an essentially Christian basis. Louis Blanc's maxim, 
^^From every one according to his ability, and to every one 
according to his need," is so lofty and unselfish that even 
socialists think it would not work in a society just emerging 
from capitaHsm. Yet that is the principle on which our 
schools are maintained. Every family is taxed for their 
support according to its financial ability, and it gets the 
benefits of the schools according to its needs. A rich man 
contributes heavily to the school tax though he may have 
neither child nor grandchild to profit by them. A man with 
ten children gets ten times as much good from the schools 
as the man with one child, and — others things being equal 
— pays no more for their maintenance. Every 'enlarge- 
ment of the functions of the schools makes this Christian 
principle more striking. 

Thus our educational system has passed through a re- 
generating process. As with the family and the Church 
the line of progress ran from tyranny to freedom, from 
aristocratic privilege to democracy of opportunity, from 
self-seeking to the enthusiasm of service. In detail the 
bigger part of the change is still before us, but here 
too a constitutional change has taken place which may 
justly be called a christianizing of the educational organiza- 
tion. The love of the people has put its approval on the 
result. It works. The support of the common schools is the 



146 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

largest item in the tax bills of our communities. We have 
learned to be ashamed of some powerful elements of our 
national life, but we are proud of our schools. When we 
annexed the Philippines, and our astonished American con- 
science inquired how we could create foreign dependencies 
and subject peoples by conquest and purchase like any other 
bloody tyrant, we hugged the consolation that at any rate 
the school would follow the flag. In sizing up the future for 
our FiHpino brothers, the commercial corporation was our 
biggest anxiety, the public school our best justification. 
The school is Christian ; the corporation — not yet. 

In the case of the school, as in the case of the family, 
organized Christianity contributed a large part of the forces 
which worked the change. Before the educational appetite 
had pervaded the people sufficiently to run on its own 
strength, and before the democratized State had bent its 
larger resources to the task of popular education, the 
Church was the chief agency that fostered it. Wherever 
in its earlier stages the school sought out the poor and 
neglected classes, the missionary impulse was furnished 
by religion. That pioneering service of the Church is in 
danger of being obscured to-day in some countries because 
the Church is so reluctant to be superseded by the State, 
and because it has often blocked the emancipation of the 
intellect. But taking the whole history of education in the 
Christian nations, a fair judgment will allow the Church a 
large balance to its credit. 

In our own country education certainly owes an immense 
debt to Christianity. Most of our American colonies were 
organized and developed by financial corporations that were 
in the colonizing business for the profits they hoped to make 
out of the colonists. I fail to remember any noteworthy 
efforts by these dividend makers to put education on its 
feet in the new country. The high standards set by the 
New England colonies were set by religious men and under 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 47 

religious motives. In the westward march of our popula- 
tion, when the Kfe of the frontier absorbed the energies of 
the settlers in a hard struggle to get a footing, and reduced 
even the educated individuals to the monotony and the 
fierce passions of primitive civilization, the churches stood 
almost single-handed for the higher interests of mankind. 
They were always hard-pushed to build their simple edifices 
and support their ministers, yet they founded academies 
and colleges and encouraged their young people to deny 
themselves for years and ^^get an education.'' The edu- 
cators who molded the earlier generations of American 
manhood by their earnestness and heroic devotion, and to 
whom we look back now wistfully as an almost extinct race 
of Kfe-givers, simply embodied the spirit of Christianity 
appHed to the intellectual life. That enthusiasm for educa- 
tion, which is one of the finest characteristics of our country 
and has gone far to redeem us from the charge of gross 
mammonism, was kindled and fed by the churches and 
ministers, by the denominational academies and colleges, 
and by the men and women who were bred in both. These 
forces have infused that missionary spirit into our educa- 
tional system which reaches out a summoning hand to the 
needy and aspiring. Our country has been distinguished for 
the immense gifts to the cause of education. How many 
were directly prompted by religion? How many at least 
indirectly by the moral impulses surviving in the children 
of rehgious famihes ? The friendly helpfulness of churches 
and ministers toward the public schools and high schools 
has been all the more creditable because there has been no 
organic connection to call out the sense of responsibiUty. 

A fourth great section of our social order which has been 
christianized is the political Hfe. To Americans this may 
seem a staggering assertion, for of all corrupt things surely 
our politics is the corruptest. I confess to some misgivings 
in moving that this brother be received among the regen- 



148 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

erate, but I plead on his behalf that he is a newly saved 
sinner. . Politics has been on the thorny path of sanctifica- 
tion only about a century and a half, and the tattered 
clothes and questionable smells of the far country still cHng 
to the prodigal. 

The fundamental redemption of the State took place 
when special privilege was thrust out of the constitution 
and theory of our government and it was based on the 
principle of personal Hberty and equal rights. 

When the rich and the poor have justice meted to them 
in our courts with an uneven hand, and the fact is made 
plain and comprehensible, it is felt to be an outrage and a 
betrayal of the spirit of our institutions. When powerful 
interests receive special consideration and benefits from 
Congress or the State legislatures, all concerned are careful 
to mask the fact and disguise the action as if it were done 
for the pubHc interest. When the property of the rich is 
partly exempted from taxation by unequal methods of 
assessment, and the burden of pubHc expenditure is thrown 
on the poorer classes, we feel free to protest against it as a 
departure from the clear intent of our fundamental laws. 
In short, inequaUty and oppression, the denial of equal 
rights and of the equal humanity of all is felt to be a back- 
sHding and disgrace. 

But the time was when these things were sanctioned as 
just and honorable by law and pubHc opinion. InequaKty 
and privilege were part of the constitution of States. 
Feudalism shaped the social order of the Middle Ages, just 
as democracy and capitalism make up the social order of 
our own age. But in feudalism class differences and class 
privileges were essential to the very theory of government. 
The nobleman was on a wholly different footing before the 
law than the common man. He had to be tried by men of 
his own class, who were disposed by class feeling to side with 
him, and the baser forms of punishment did not exist for 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 49 

him. Some remnants of this inequahty still linger wherever 
feudal rank survives. A Russian noble and a moujik who 
commit the same offense do not receive the same punish- 
ment. In Germany two workmen who cut each other up 
with knives and two army officers who cut each other up 
with swords in a duel are treated in a very different manner 
by the law. In Italy two cardinals recently claimed their 
right as Italian princes to have their deposition as wit- 
nesses taken in their own houses instead of coming into a 
pubHc court like common people. Within certain limits 
the feudal nobles usually had the right of judicature in their 
territories ; when a peasant was oppressed by the servants 
of the baron and claimed justice in the court, he found the 
baron or his appointee sitting in the court to decide the case. 
Imagine that the constitution of IlHnois provided that a 
director of a corporation could be tried only by a jury of 
corporation officers, and that every pubHc service corpora- 
tion had the right to operate its own court of justice to 
settle all difficulties with its employees and the ordinary 
public, and could put the offensive citizen who protested 
against the size of his gas bill into the corporation jail ! 
In the feudal age landed property was almost the only form 
of property, and the landed nobility corresponded very fully 
to what we call ^'the Interests," so that the illustration is 
not at all fanciful. 

A hundred other special privileges were claimed and 
exercised by the nobility, not ^^on the side,'' but frankly as 
their natural right. Even a petty noble could declare and 
wage war, a right of such momentous importance for the 
people that in our vast nation only a single public body is 
vested with that power. At one time about a hundred and 
fifty peers and barons of France could coin and circulate 
money, another right of profound importance to public 
welfare. The higher civil and military careers were open 
only to nobles and churchmen. PoUtical rights were re- 



150 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL 0]9LDER 

stricted to landowners ; consequently it was made hard for 
the baseborn to acquire land at all. The system of re- 
stricting the suffrage on property lines is a remnant of the 
feudal system of granting pohtical power to those who 
already had economic power, and of depriving the economi- 
cally helpless of the political means of asserting their rights. 
Even in so enhghtened a country as Prussia a three-class 
system of suffrage prevails by which one heavy taxpayer 
in the first class may count for as much as a hundred work- 
ingmen in the third class. 

Only by comparison with the past do we realize that our 
pohtical system has really entered on a decisive moral 
change. The foundations of our commonwealth were for- 
tunately laid when the democratic idealism of the eighteenth 
century was gathering strength. Soon afterward it got 
its tremendous utterance in the French Revolution. In 
every revolutionary movement the highest political and 
social conceptions of that age are seized by the revolutionary 
party, and put forward in order to enlist moral support 
and enthusiasm. When the plowshare tears open the 
soil, new seeds can gain lodgment. The American Revo- 
lution, like the French, was essentially a movement of the 
capitalist class and was impelled by their economic interests, 
but as long as the struggle lasted the leaders were inspired 
by higher enthusiasms, and the necessity of rallying all 
available spiritual forces gave the convinced radicals and 
idealists a comparatively free hand for the moment. Be- 
tween 1776 and 1786 the ardent sentiments of the Declara- 
tion of Independence had cooled down into very calculating 
class interest, and the fundamental law of our country was 
by no means framed to promote and extend democracy in 
coming days. But at least we had no king, and no landed 
and hereditary nobihty. The young capitalist class still 
had its milk teeth. So by the favor of Providence and by 
our pohtical and economic babyhood the principles of Hb- 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 151 

erty and equality got a solid footing in our traditions. Some 
of the inherited immoralities, such as the restrictions of the 
suffrage under which the Constitution was adopted/ were 
overcome, and even when immense inequaHties of posses- 
sion grew up, appeal still lay to the primitive decalogue of 
our liberties. 

In practice we are a nation of backsKders. The whisper 
of awe and surprise that runs through the country when a 
powerful malefactor is actually brought to justice is proof 
that the rich and the poor are not equal before our courts. 
The real decisions in politics are made by small cUques, and 
except in seasons of popular revolt the votes of great num- 
bers of citizens count for almost nothing. In actual prac- 
tice the administration of pubhc affairs is full of favoritism 
to the powerful, and even more full of damnable neglect for 
those things which are really vital to the common people. 

Yet all these things are in the nature of a derailment of 
justice; the roadbed and the trackage are still there, even 
when the train is ditched. These apostasies from the Amer- 
ican standards of right have to cloak their real nature in 
order to exist at all. The means of dethroning the usurpers 
of pubhc power are always within reach. Graft is at least 
not embodied in the Constitution, nor declared to be the 
hallowed foundation of the commonwealth. When some 
of our States concluded to curb the extralegal power of 
the bosses by direct primaries, uniform accounting, direct 
legislation, and the recall, these enormous changes were 
secured by only a few years of moderately vigorous agita- 
tion. On the other hand, when great bodies of voters in 
Berlin in 1908 tried to make a peaceful protest against the 
iniquitous Prussian three-class system of suffrage, by parad- 
ing in the streets, they were dispersed and cut down with 
sabers. Slavery was the one great social institution contra- 
dicting the democratic principle w^hich was able to secure 

^ Of 3,000,000 inhabitants about 120,000 had the suffrage. 



152 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

recognition and protection in the federal Constitution. It 
long jutted into our American life as a disturbing remnant 
from an earlier and evil age. From the terrible sacrifice 
which it cost our nation to get rid of it we can learn the 
difference between a suppression of human rights that is 
supported by the fundamental law, and a frustration of 
human rights that circumvents the law. 

The backslidings of our politics are partly due to the youth 
of democracy. It is still in its adolescence. For ages 
government was managed for the people by a select group 
and all the expedients and theories of government were 
evolved to suit that condition. The people have to learn 
how to do it. The running of cooperative stores and fac- 
tories is a new art which has to be learned with losses and 
suffering, whereas management by corporations is well 
understood and effective. Democracy stands for the 
cooperative idea applied to politics ; monarchy and aris- 
tocracy represent in statecraft the same ideals and methods 
which corporations represent in business. 

Another cause for the frequent breakdown of popular gov- 
ernment is the fact that the State very directly affects 
the property interests of the country. But these interests 
do not in the least acknowledge the principle of equal 
human rights, and balk at every attempt to conform them 
to that doctrine. Consequently politics is the battle- 
ground of two opposing forces, of the Christian principle 
of liberty and equahty lodged in our democracy, and of the 
mammonistic principle lodged in our business Hfe. The 
family, the Church, and the school are only indirectly 
affected by this struggle; politics is involved directly. 
The State is like a breakwater, pounded by hungry seas. 
As long as it holds, let us thank God and not wonder if it 
is wet and slippery with ooze. When our business Hfe is 
christianized, the fundamental Christianity of our political 
structure will become clearer and more effective. 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 53 

In spite of all failures we can assert that our political 
communities are constitutionally on a Christian footing. 
Instead of legalizing class inequality, they at least try to 
be an organized expression of the equal rights of all. In- 
stead of being a firmly wrought system for holding down the 
weak and depriving them of the natural means of self- 
help and even of a voice to utter their wrongs, our govern- 
ment tries to be a guarantee of freedom and a protection to 
the helpless. Instead of being constitutionally an organ- 
ization of a clique for their private advantage, it is planned 
as an organization of all for the common good, and only 
falls into the hands of marauding interests through the 
ignorance and laziness of the citizens. Democracy is not 
equivalent to Christianity, but in politics democracy is the 
expression and method of the Christian spirit. It has made 
the most permanent achievements in the younger com- 
munities of the Anglo-Saxon group, but it is making head- 
way throughout the world, and is the conquering tendency 
in modern political life. 

If pohtics has been christianized, how much did Chris- 
tianity help in converting it ? It is possible to make out a 
strong case for the proposition that democracy has come 
in spite of the Church and that its best champions were 
avowed infidels. But Christianity is more than the Church. 
The reactionary doings of ecclesiastical machines can be 
put down in black and white and quoted by scoffers to the 
end of time. But the decisive movements of the Christian 
spirit are subtle and hard to record ; like the wind it bloweth 
where it listeth, and few listen to it even while it is blowing ; 
fewer still can trace its effect after the wind has hushed. 
The struggle for political democracy in its infancy was so 
closely connected with the struggle for religious toleration 
and freedom that it is impossible to disentangle the two 
and decide how much strength each factor would have had 
by itself, ("ertainly- the success of political democracy was 



154 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

most early and durable where radical and pure types of 
Christianity had gained a footing and influence. The 
sense of human worth, the sensitive response to the rights 
of the poor and helpless, the fighting courage bred by bold 
religion, are pervasive ingredients in the national Kfe which 
silently cooperate with all efforts to christianize public 
life. Democracy has been best led in Protestant countries 
where a free type of religion ranged men of distinctively 
Christian character on the side of popular liberty. On the 
other hand, where free Christianity was suppressed by 
Church and State, the lovers of Hberty were ranged against 
both Church and State and the hatred of tyranny took on 
the colors of irreligion. In that case the infidels really 
voiced the spirit of Christianity better than the Church; 
Christ once more found better friends among the publicans 
than among the Pharisees. Voltaire, for instance, was a 
destroying angel who mocked and- lashed an apostate and 
unbeHeving Church with the Christian weapons of human- 
ity, charity, and fraternity. But the fact that such cases 
are abnormal impress them on the public notice and mem- 
ory. The more broadly and justly we view the history of 
the last eight centuries, the more influence will we attribute 
to Christianity in the rise of modern democracy. In the 
Anglo-Saxon communities especially the spirit of religion 
has blended with the spirit of freedom ; or rather, here the 
spirit of Christianity has been set free sufficiently to do its 
work in the field of poHtical Hfe, and has found one great 
outlet for its power in creating a passionate love for free- 
dom and equaHty. 

Four great sections of our social order — the family, the 
organized rehgious Hfe, the institutions of education, and the 
poKtical organization of our nation — have passed through 
constitutional changes which have made them to some 
degree part of the organism through' which the spirit of 
Christ can do its work in humanity. The ana] ysis of these 



THE CHRISTIANIZED SECTIONS OF OUR SOCIAL ORDER 1 55 

redeemed parts of our social order has explained by histor- 
ical object lessons in what sense we can speak of chris- 
tianizing the social order, and has also brought home to us 
with what gradualness and through what complex forces 
such a process has to work its way. The presumption is 
that other portions of the social order will have to sub- 
mit to similar changes if they are to be christianized. 

If this analysis is even approximately correct, it ought 
to create an immense hopefulness in all Christian minds. 
Social Christianity is not, then, an untried venture. The 
larger part of the work of christianizing our social order is 
already accompKshed, and the success which has attended 
it ought to create a victorious self-assertion in all who stake 
their faith on its effectiveness. These redeemed portions 
of our social hfe are the portions to which our hearts go 
out in loving pride and loyalty. Christianity works. 
Moreover every part of the social order which has come even 
a little under the law of Christ has immediately served as 
a vantage ground for further progress. There has been a 
speeding up of redemption. When a man is gagged, 
bound, and tied to a stake, the hardest part is to get one 
hand free : every further gain is easier and makes ultimate 
freedom surer. 

What is next ? 



CHAPTER III 

OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER 

The next thing is Business. 

Our business life is the seat and source of our present 
troubles. So much ought to be plain to all who care to see. 
It is in commerce and industry that we encounter the great 
collective inhumanities that shame our Christian feeling, 
such as child labor and the bloody total of industrial acci- 
dents. Here we find the friction between great classes of 
men which makes whole communities hot with smoldering 
hate or sets them ablaze with lawlessness. To commerce 
and industry we are learning to trace the foul stream of 
sex prostitution, poverty, and political corruption. Just 
as an epidemic of typhoid fever would call for an analysis 
of the water supply, so these chronic conditions call for a 
moral analysis of the economic order and justify the pre- 
sumption that it is fundamentally unchristian. Business 
men themselves concede that it is ; some by calmly denying 
that Christian principles have anything to do with business ; 
others by sadly confessing that Christianity ought to govern 
business, but that it would mean loss or ruin to put Chris- 
tian ethics in practice. 

Business life is the unregenerate section of our social 
order. If by some magic it could be plucked out of our 
total social life in all its raw selfishness, and isolated on an 
island, unmitigated by any other factors of our life, that 
island would immediately become the object of a great for- 
eign mission crusade for all Christendom. Our argument, 
therefore, will now concentrate on this unredeemed por- 
tion of the social order. 

156 



OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER 1 57 

Our first need is to analyze our economic system so that 
we may understand wherein and why it is fundamentally 
unchristian. Most of us have accepted our economic sys- 
tem as we accept our stomach, without understanding its 
workings. Nor is it easy to understand the moral essentials 
of this huge and comphcated social machinery. We have 
no such historical perspective of it as our great-grandchil- 
dren will have when they study the Great Industrial Transi- 
tion of the Twentieth Century in college. We are like a 
swimmer in a stormy sea. To negotiate the next wave is 
the great object of his concern, but whether that wave is part 
of a tidal current sweeping him toward shore or out to sea, his 
narrow horizon does not tell him. So amid the swift changes 
of our age we find it hard to distinguish between incidental 
troubles and the essential drifts of our economic system. 

We stumble along untraveled trails when we attempt an 
analysis of our economic system from a Christian poiijt of 
view. The collective intelHgence of the Christian Church 
has not really come to any clearness about the fundamental 
moral relations involved in modern economic Hfe. It 
instinctively condemns some of its worst excrescences, but 
even among its leaders many have no clear grasp of the 
moral nature and genius of our industrial and commercial 
world. We have been neglecting the Doctrine of Sin in our 
theology. We might look to Christian business men for an 
incisive comprehension of the moral conditions amid which 
they work, but most of them are so driven by business that 
they have no time to consider their situation broadly and 
with historical insight. They see keenly what is immedi- 
ately necessary, but in the broader tendencies of their Kfe 
a vast collective will bids them go, and they go. They are 
slaves of the lamp. Business imposes its point of view on 
them, just as the CathoHc Church molds the ideas of the 
priests who labor in it. When ^^ practical men" do theorize, 
they are often the dizziest theorizers of all. 



158 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Nevertheless, a moral analysis of our economic life is now 
in the process of making. Our whole nation has of late 
constituted itself a commission of investigation and is 
engaged in a profoundly earnest attempt to understand the 
morals of business. Nothing calls out such serious thought 
and discussion at present as the unsatisfactory relation of 
the economic life to the higher laws and values of humanity. 
This book is part of this collective effort to understand. I 
propose throughout to think from the point of view of a 
Christian man. The tests that I shall apply are not tech- 
nical but moral. Does our business system create sound 
and noble manhood ? Does it make it fairly easy to do 
right and hard to do wrong ? Does it call men upward or 
tempt them downward? Does it reward or penalize fra- 
ternal action? Does it furnish the material basis for the 
Reign of God on earth ? As a Christian man I shall have to 
judge more patiently and forbearingly than if I were inquir- 
ing why high prices are making it hard for me to feed my 
family and rear my children. I shall also have to probe 
more incisively and condemn more sweepingly than if I 
were arguing as a lawyer or an economist. Christ would 
pardon many of those whom we send to cruel years in prison, 
and would consign to the Gehenna of wrath some of those 
who sit in our seats of judgment and respectability. 

We should get the most enlightening comments on our 
economic life if we could bring to life some able mind that 
went to sleep in a.d. 1700, or if some one could live in the 
year 2000 like the hero of ^'Looking Backward" and come 
back to us. By comparing our present system backward 
with the order out of which it has developed, or forward 
with the order into which it is silently passing, we should get 
a realization of the distinctive qualities of the life in the 
midst of which we are moving. But even if the range of 
our experience is short, yet the movement of society has 
been so rapid that even twenty or thirty years of Qb§erva- 



OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER . 1 59 

tion allow us to measure the curve of the road along which 
we are all swinging. 

When I was a boy in the seventies, I spent several happy 
summers working on the farm in a German community in 
Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. The tools of our work 
were very simple. There was a horserake and a mowing 
machine, but the sheaves of grain were raked and bound by 
hand, and the hoe was the pillar of agriculture. Except 
for the buzz saw in the old sawmill by the creek there was 
no power machine in sight. Most of the products of the 
farm were consumed by those who raised them. We took 
the grain to the mill and waited till it was ground. The 
miller took his pay in grain. Occasionally we butchered a 
sheep and had fresh meat to eat. The spinning wheel still 
buzzed in the kitchen, and a hand loom pounded in the 
^'shop." On market days we took butter, eggs, and berries 
to Williamsport and sold them to the housewives on the 
street curb, or we went from house to house offering what 
we had. The old farmer Kked to have me along because 
multiplying pounds by cents was a confusing operation 
for which a city boy came in handy. The calculating age 
had not yet struck him. There was little money to handle. 

On that farm we lived the economic Hfe of the pre- 
capitalistic era. All who have ever worked on an old- 
fashioned farm can have a Kving comprehension of the 
industrial era that is slowly sinking out of sight. 

Since that time modern methods have invaded and revo- 
lutionized farming at some points. Think of the great 
wheat farms where gasoHne engines and power machines 
have become the farmer's pets ; or the truck farms where 
they raise asparagus, cranberries, or peaches in quantities 
that make the digestive apparatus of the onlooker seem puny 
and behind the times. In the busy season these farmers 
become employers of gang labor. They have learned to 
figure and to calculate their expenses and profits in frac- 



l6o CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

tional percentage. Their produce is raised ^^for the mar- 
ket" and not for their home. The farmer's family eats 
fiour milled in Minneapolis and canned stuff that he buys 
in town. He ships his produce to commission merchants 
in a distant city, who sell it to dealers, who sell it to 
hotel men and housekeepers whom the farmer never sees. 
He has become a cog in the vast machinery of modern pro- 
duction. He feeds the world, and the world feeds him. 
On these modernized farms we can watch the industrial 
revolution invading the backward domain of agriculture. 
Farming has begun to travel the same road which industry 
began to travel a century earlier. 

My own boyhood has also supplied me with a lively 
impression of the patriarchal regime of the old handicraft 
system. On a visit to Germany I spent some days in the 
home of a master tailor in the ancient town of Altena in 
Westphalia, where my father and grandfather had been 
Lutheran pastors. His shop was upstairs in his home. 
Half a dozen journeymen and a couple of apprentices 
squatted cross-legged on tables, plying the needle. The 
master worked with them and shared their talk. At noon 
all ate at his table and he cut the bread and served the soup 
to them with due respect to seniority. When he said 
grace before and after meat, all bowed their heads with him. 
Downstairs in a tiny store, like a hall bedroom, he kept a 
few bolts of stuff. From these his customers selected their 
cloth, or they brought him their own goods to make up. 
A stock of ready-made clothing, made for potential and 
invisible buyers, probably never entered his mind. 

This is a miniature picture of industry in the precapital- 
istic era, of its narrow market, its simple methods, and its | 
direct relations between men. Such httle shops continue 
to supply the bulk of economic products throughout the 
Orient and to a large extent in continental Europe. Very 
recently I found only one small shoe store selling factory- 



OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER l6l 

made shoes in a German city of twenty thousand inhabit- 
ants, but more than a hundred small shops ready and able 
to take any order that dealt with leather and feet. 

Contrast with this simple form of industry the great 
centers of the shoe or clothing trade in America. Huge 
factories whirr with specialized machinery. Every turn 
of the process has its machine ; every man has his trick. 
Thousands of men cooperate under centralized direction. 
The old patriarchal relations between master and men are 
gone ; they no longer work together, nor talk together, nor 
eat together, nor pray together. The most competent 
manager of a shoe factory may not be able to make a shoe, 
to save his life. But he is an expert in organization. The 
men who own the factory may be still farther remote from 
its actual work. Some of them may never have seen the 
place ; they have bought stock because it is earning 8 per 
cent and has a good rating. While the goods are being 
made, no one knows who will wear this coat or those shoes. 
They are made for the market, seized by the roaring wheels 
of commerce, and carried to the ends of the earth. 

In the old order the aim was to make a living, to give 
the children an education and a start in life, to lay some- 
thing by for a rainy day, and to rise a step in life if possible. 
The range of possibilities and the range of ambition were 
both narrow. There was always a big difference between 
the thrifty man and the shiftless man ; between the me- 
chanic who sent his boy to college, and his cousin who went 
fishing and let his job wait for him. But the richest and 
the poorest in our old-time village communities were only 
a few thousand dollars apart. In the cities men of business 
sagacity equal to any that we now have were content if 
a lifetime of success won them a few hundred thousand 
dollars. 

To-day the range of possibilities is enormous, and the 
unsatisfied thirst for wealth has grown correspondingly. 



1 62 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The poorest and the richest are as far apart as the mole- 
hill and the peaks of the Sierras. In the higher reaches of 
business getting a living drops out of sight. The dominant 
concern is to get profit, and to invest it to get more profit. 
In its main river bed the current of business has become 
a torrent. 

Thus the modern economic order is developing right be- 
fore our eyes. We younger men and women have seen the 
revolution proceed in American industry and commerce. 
We have seen the great department stores, the manufac- 
turing centers, and the trusts sprout and shoot up like 
magic. Our children will see similar transitions in farming. 
Within one generation our country has become the classical 
demonstration of capitalistic industry. A similar transi- 
tion took place a century earlier in England, and more 
slowly on the continent of Europe. 

This modernizing of industry has largely been a simple 
expansion in size, a sort of adolescence of the industry 
previously existing. The essential thing in it was not the 
application of steam power, but the utilizing of human 
association on a large scale. More men were coordinated 
under one management, more wealth combined in joint- 
stock enterprises. A vaster market was opened up. Or- 
ganization became a science and the chief of all crafts. 
The tendency to combine and mass human labor was in 
full swing before the invention of the steam engine, and 
would have gone on without it, but the power machine 
immeasurably intensified it and furnished the technical 
basis for the combination and division of labor. Gradually 
the machine has become a sort of new partner in produc- 
tion. The old hand tools merely aided the hand that plied 
them and never made that hand unnecessary. The new 
machine tools tend to become the real workers. They sup- 
plant some men entirely, and reduce others to the posi- 
tion of feeding and tending the machine. 



OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER 1 63 

Now, in so far as our present economic order is simply 
the perfecting of human association, Christianity can have 
no quarrel with it. The massing of industrial units, the 
specializing of functions, the mastery of natural forces by 
science and technical skill, are henceforth part and parcel 
of every social order that will develop on this planet unless 
the race reverts to barbarism. The attempts to check this 
process by prohibiting department stores or enforcing the 
Sherman Antitrust Law have bucked against manifest 
destiny and the law of evolution. An ideal social order 
would have the serious problem of counteracting the monot- 
ony and one-sidedness which are inseparable from machine 
work, and of protecting the freedom and individuality of 
the single worker in the centralized pressure of industrial 
organization, but it could not turn its face back to patri- 
archal simplicity. An enlarged and diversified industrial 
organization is not an evil, but a good. 

The moral objection Hes, not against the size and com- 
plexity of the modern system, but against the fact that this 
wonderful product of human ability and toil with its im- 
mense powers of production has gravitated into the owner- 
ship and control of a relatively small class of men. This 
group is always changing ; some drop out, others enter. 
But these personal changes are of little importance for the 
make-up of society. The group is permanent, and the 
men in it have acquired a proportion of power over their 
fellows which — human nature being what it is — must 
lead to injustice, to inequality, and to the frustration of 
the Christian conception of human fellowship. 

In the old handicraft system ownership and power were 
widely distributed. Every little shop was an industrial 
unit, and every master mechanic was an independent power. 
Every apprentice could hope in time to become the owner 
of so simple a plant. This is the condition still prevailing 
generally in our farm life in America. Our farmers are 



164 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

workmen who own their instruments of production. They 
are workmen and capitahsts combined in one. That makes 
them strong, and it is no wonder that they work Uke grim 
death before they will let a mortgage force them from the 
hold which their farm gives them on God's universe. On 
the other hand, our factory operatives have no right nor 
claim in the place, the tools, or the output of their work. 
They are propertyless men who own only their body and its 
working force. Even if they own a home and have a sav- 
ings-bank account, that property does not aid them in 
their work and gives them no share in the control of their 
shop. In such cases they have property, but no capital. 

In the modern industrial order ownership and control 
are not vested in the workers, but in an entirely different 
social group which stands apart from them by its interests, 
social status, habits of life, and modes of thought, — the 
group of investors or capitalists. A man may work twenty 
years for a corporation and contribute the most valuable 
service in building it up, yet have no part nor lot in it at 
the end, and be liable to dismissal at any time. Another 
man who has never contributed a hard day's work to it 
either of body or mind is a part owner of it and shares 
in its control because he has invested money in it. It is 
true that in most cases the two groups overlap. A number 
of individuals are usually both owners and active intellec- 
tual workers in the concern, and this is the redeeming feature 
in the situation. But even that is not essential. The man- 
aging officers of a corporation may all be salaried men. 
And in any case the power which the managers wield comes 
to them from the owners and not from the workers. The 
capitalist group is in control. 

It is the extent and thoroughness of this two-class ad- 
justment which differentiates the modern industrial order 
from the old. It is this also which creates its chief moral 
dangers. No one will understand the moral side of our 



OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER 1 65 

economic relations unless he comprehends this two-group 
system. Wherever any industrial undertaking is really 
modernized, the separation of these two groups becomes 
clearly marked. On the one side, we have a growing body 
of workers to whom possession of the plant in which they 
work becomes a more and more remote possibihty; on 
the other side, a scattered group of owners, of whom only 
a few share in the productive labor of the concern. But 
the former group is under the control of the latter. For 
this reason our modern system is called the capitalistic 
system. 

Divergent points of view and a conflict of interests 
follow with absolute necessity from this two-class system. 
The interests of the worker revolve around his job, for a job 
is his only chance to apply his working force, and his work- 
ing force is all he has. So the job is his sole hold on life. 
His entire system of ethics becomes job-centric. To get 
a job, to hold it against those who might take it from him, 
and to make it yield him as much as possible of pay, leisure, 
and comfort is the absorbing concern of his soul. As the 
sun is the source of warmth and life to the earth, so is the 
job to the worker. 

On the other hand, the economic interests of the capitalist 
revolve around his profits, and since the capitaHst class is 
the controlling and dominant class, the desire for profit 
dominates our whole industrial organization. All its efforts 
converge on one end, to make dividends. All the parts 
of the great organism of production move toward profit 
with an overwhelming singleness of purpose. Whenever 
profit has collided with the higher interests of humanity, 
the latter have hitherto gone down with sickening regularity. 
This triumphant sway of profit as the end of work and 
existence puts the stamp of mammonism on our modern 
Hfe. 

Another essential feature of our modern business Hfe 



1 66 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

is its speculative method. In large sections of industry 
production is not in response to an actual demand, but in 
anticipation of a possible demand. Business has to fore- 
cast the future, not only in the size and quality of a season's 
output, but in the erection of great plants. This means 
risk and venture. Now there is an element of risk in any 
productive labor, even in baiting your hook for a fish or 
planting cabbages in your back yard. But when produc- 
tion is on so vast a scale as to-day, when competition is so 
keen, and when the lure of possible profit is so dazzHng, the 
wholesome natural tingle of daring becomes a consuming 
fever. The speculative character of business causes enor- 
mous waste and to that extent stamps business as techni- 
cally inefficient. But what concerns us here is that it 
creates a feverish heat of desire in which the higher qualities 
of life are melted and burned. If covetousness is a valuable 
quality in human nature, business is a superb institution 
to stimulate and educate it. But if '^the love of money 
is the root of evil," what is business? 

When we try to judge our economic system from the point 
of view of Christian morals, we must not forget that it has 
biased the moral judgment by which it is to be measured. 
Recent as the capitalistic system is in human history, it 
has been in operation long enough to mold the laws and 
policies of all industrial nations, and to put a deep impress 
on the ethical and reHgious ideas of the modern world. On 
the cut-stone front of a skyscraper are mighty caryatids 
that seem to hold up its vast weight on their bent shoulders. 
But we know that it is really supported by the steel girders 
and trusses of the framework, and all other features of the 
building must adjust themselves to the mechanical necessi- 
ties of this essential structure. So in every social order 
that has ever existed, the economic system then in force 
was one of the determining influences. Dogmatic social- 
ists often run the theory of ^^ economic determinism" into 



OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC ORDER 167 

the ground, but no student of history can question the tre- 
mendous importance of the economic factor. In the old 
handicraft order generations of small producers had built 
up a system of municipal laws and guild regulations which 
sheltered them and their interests against powerful and 
greedy competitors. The aim of Christian legislation at 
that time was to secure to every business man a moderate 
circle of customers and a decent hving, and to shackle 
those who would try to secure inordinate wealth by snatch- 
ing the bread of their fellows. When the capitalistic 
method gathered force and headway, it swept away these 
protective laws which hampered free competition and the 
massing of capital and labor. It created a new philosophy 
of economics. It secured control of political power, and 
enacted laws that threw the field open to those who were 
strong enough to seize the vantage points. If anything, 
it favored the strong against the weak, and gave to him that 
hath. The fierce struggle which followed speeded up the 
machinery of production, increased the material wealth 
of the industrial nations boundlessly, and put a generation 
of strong executive intellects in the saddle. But it trampled 
down the humane considerations of mercy and fraternity 
which had to some extent prevailed, and created a general 
temper of lawlessness and ruthlessness which has now be- 
come second nature to us all, so that we hardly reahze how 
hard and inhuman it all is. To Hmit female labor to ten 
hours a day in the interest of humanity is to-day a great 
moral achievement, and the idea of a legal living wage is 
a startling innovation to a generation that has inherited the 
moral point of view of the competitive era. 

In a rough and preliminary way we have now sketched 
the chief moral features of our economic system. We have 
found the business man in the seat of power. He and his 
class own and control the immense enginery of modern 
production. All moral relations run back to him. In the 



1 68 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

chapters that now follow, we shall take up the various rela- 
tions which he sustains to his fellows in the organism of 
business life : first, his relation to other men of his own class 
with whom he competes or associates ; second, his relation 
to the workers whom he employs ; third, his relation to the 
consumers whom he supplies. 



I 






CHAPTER IV 

THE LAW or TOOTH AND NAIL 

When a number of men in the same community engage 
in the same Hne of productive labor, what is the normal and 
desirable relation between them? Isolation, if the nature 
of their work compels it ; cooperation, if the nature of their 
work permits it. A cooperating group, in which all have 
a common end, each man contributing his share and de- 
pending on his fellows for their part, brings men into the 
most efficient, the most happy, and the most moral rela- 
tion to one another. Wherever teamwork is done, on the 
baseball field, in war, in gang labor, in the faculty of a 
college, or in political groups, work has zest, and the nobler 
quahties of men are brought out. The loyalties called out 
by teamwork are so great that even when a team unites for 
immoral ends, as in the case of a gang of toughs, a marauding 
clan, or a ring of corrupt poHticians, the men feel that their 
faithfulness to their comrades excuses any evil they do and 
casts a glamour of nobility over their organization. War 
has been made splendid in all its red-handedness chiefly 
because it trains to teamwork and develops devotion to 
the group. 

The instinct and capacity for cooperation among work- 
mates is one form of the great social instinct of love in man. 
The same pervasive force which draws man to woman, 
friend to friend, and countryman to countryman expresses 
itself in economic labor by the pleasure and stimulus of 
combined work. Wherever men work out a smooth and 
effective system of cooperating in their labor, love has found 

169 



lyo CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

an organized social expression, and as such a group works 
in common, the capacity for mutual understanding and 
good will is strengthened. But to increase the strength 
of love and to make it effective in all human relations is 
also the great aim of Christianity. ^'Love is the fulfillment 
of the law." Therefore an effective cooperative group is 
a christianized segment of humanity. 

Cooperation is not only morally beautiful, but economi- 
cally effective. The great achievements of modern life are 
almost wholly due to the application of this principle. 
Progress consisted in learning to expand the size of our co- 
operating groups and to make all the parts interlock more 
smoothly. The triumphs of applied science are due to the 
sharing of intellectual results and methods. The modern 
means of traffic and communication have turned entire 
nations and groups of nations into semiorganized co- 
operating groups. Individually we are neither stronger 
nor wiser than our fathers, but we have learned to work 
together, and that has created our wonderful age. The old 
saying that ^^ competition is the life of trade " is a He.^ Com- 
petition may be a stimulant of sales, but cooperation is 
the life of the whole economic process. Capitalism itself 
gets its strength and value not from its competitive ele- 
ment, but from the fact that it furnishes the means of com- 
bining many units of capital in the financing of an industrial 
undertaking, and many units of labor in the operation of it. 
Thus cooperation is both moral and efficient. If it were 
not economically efficient, it would not be moral ; if it were 
not moral, it would not be permanently efficient. 

In so far as modern business life has wrought out effective 
methods of associating many workers in friendly coopera- 

^ The economic inefficiency of competition is another story. In Roches- 
ter 28 milk peddlers travel up and down one street to serve 79 homes. On 
another route 57 milkmen travel 30 miles to serve 363 homes ; one man would 
travel two miles to serve them all. As a consequence of this waste of labor 
milk is dear and its quality uncertain. 



THE LAW OF TOOTH AND NAIL 171 

tion, it is good. But the application of this principle of 
cooperation is still limited to small areas and territories, 
and at the border line of these territories we have antago- 
nism and war. In the sixteenth century Germany was cut 
up into something like a thousand political units, crazier 
than any jig-saw puzzle, each with its own government, its 
own taxes, its own loyalty, and its own right to go to war. 
While France and England were growing into compact 
political organisms, Germany remained disunited, torn by 
internal dissensions and wars, mocking the patriotism of 
its sons by its petty fatherlands. The Franco-German War 
at last welded the surviving States into an empire, and the 
wonderful rise of German commerce and wealth since 1870 
is another demonstration of the power of teamwork. The 
industrial and commercial map of our nation is still cut up 
into hundreds of thousands of economic units. Inside of 
each firm or corporation cooperation and efficiency prevail, 
but where one business concern colHdes with another of 
the same kind, we find either war or a truce. All the 
virtues and the vices of war are developed.- Most com- 
petitors conceal their methods, their markets, their prices, 
their plans, like the generals of contending armies. Some 
department stores have an organized spy system to see 
that their rivals offer no special bargains without being 
followed and countered. The secretiveness made necessary 
by competition is one chief reason why our government 
has found it so hard to secure publicity, or even to get at 
the inside facts of business life for its own purposes. Some 
of the investigating commissions have had to drill and blast 
like burglars trying to get into a bank vault. In many 
lines of business a truce has been called in the competitive 
war by tacit or express agreements to maintain prices and 
respect trade areas, but where competition is in full swing, 
Jt is a war that aims to capture the other man's trade, and 
does not end until he goes out of business. Then he may 



172 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

come in as a partner or employee, and therewith the whole 
attitude to him changes. 

What is the moral effect of such a collision of interests? 
Cooperative action calls out instincts of good will and solid- 
arity ; competition represses good will, and calls out selfish- 
ness and jealousy. Men who are doing the same kind of 
work and who ought to be workmates are set into an an- 
tagonism which makes Christian love heroic instead of 
natural and spontaneous. Imagine a Methodist grocer 
who has built up a good trade on a suburban street corner. 
The trade is not large enough to support two stores, but 
a Baptist, surveying the situation and having come into 
a little money from his mother-in-law, stocks up a place 
on the opposite corner, and proposes to open his store to- 
morrow morning. The Christian law bids us love our neigh- 
bor as ourselves. Will the Methodist kneel down to-night 
and pray God to bless his Baptist brother and give him 
success in his new business? Will the Baptist pray that 
his fellow- Christian may continue to prosper? If they do 
it and mean it, they are both so saintly that the Pope ought 
to overlook any little heresies and canonize them. A man 
who is secure in his business success may feel genuine good 
will toward a young man starting out for himself in the same 
line, but in that case he is like a champion chess player 
who gives both bishops to a beginner; he is not really 
playing the game of competition, but lapsing into the hap- 
pier game of human brotherhood. 

The moral instinct of men has always condemned com- 
petitive selfishness, just as it has always admired the moral 
beauty of teamwork. Our hearts thrill when we see any 
one throwing himself heart and soul into a common task 
and risking his own safety to insure the common success. 
By the same token we fail to thrill when any one haggles 
for himself and seeks to get the better of his fellows. The 
child that *^ won't play," the soldier that deserts in time 



THE LAW or TOOTH AND NAIL 1 73 

of danger, the workman that helps to break a strike, the 
boy that ^'snitches'' on his pals, are not objects of admira- 
tion to their mates, nor to wise outsiders. The trader has 
always been the outstanding case of the man who plays his 
own hand and sacrifices social soHdarity for private gain. 
Consequently the trading class has never ranked high among 
the social classes in older civiHzations, Hke that of Japan. 
He was not expected to Umit himself by the law of honor, 
but neither did he receive honor. On the other hand, in our 
modern era the trading class has become the ruUng class, and 
consequently the selfishness of trade has been exalted to 
the dignity of an ethical principle. Every man is taught 
to seek his own advantage, and then we wonder that there 
is so little pubHc spirit. We have allowed workmates to 
be pitted against each other in the competitive struggle 
and then are astonished that Christianity has a hard time 
of it. 

The reign of competition is a reign of fear. The rate 
of mortality for small business concerns is higher than in- 
fant mortality. If all the leaden weight of fear of all busi- 
ness men who watch a vanishing margin of profit through 
the year could be gathered up and set before us in some 
dramatic form, it would palsy our joy in Hfe. Business 
panics merely render this chronic condition acute and make 
men high up who have been secure in prosperity feel the 
same sufferings which others have felt who went down 
before them. A reign of fear is never a reign of God. 
Fear makes children lie and business men cheat. In com- 
petition the worst man sets the pace, and good men follow 
because they are afraid. A capable mind with no bowels 
of mercy to hinder, who can wring the last ounce of strength 
from his men, and who puts women and children to work 
wherever men can be displaced, can outbid a morally 
sensitive man unless the latter has some counterbalancing 
advantage elsewhere. In a cooperating group the efl&ciency 



174 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

and courage of the best members of the team hold the rest 
up to their level ; in commercial competition the greed and 
inhumanity of the worst infect the rest through the medium 
of fear. For this reason considerations of humanity have 
often had so little response from communities of business 
men composed largely of Christian persons. Individually 
they are kind-hearted men ; but as members of a competi- 
tive social order they are driven by fear and forgetful of 
mercy. Workmen complain when their employers speed 
up the machinery, which compels them to keep up with its 
pace or be hurt. But their employers are also slaves of a 
huger machine, and many of them are seeking with labor- 
ing breath to keep up with a treadmill that will mangle 
them if they do not. 

The objection will be raised that the instinct of com- 
petition is inherent in human Hfe and that its free play is 
a necessary factor in the evolution of the race. That is 
quite true. Life would lose much of its zest and of its 
educational value if competition were eliminated from it. 
But there is no danger whatever that it will be. Young 
men will always compete for the love of woman (and some- 
times that game is reversed) ; students will compete for 
educational honors; workmen will compete for leadership 
within their group ; statesmen will compete for popularity 
and power. When the ablest are honored and promoted, 
it benefits all. A superior type is thereby placed in a con- 
spicuous position, and the rest are more or less modeled 
after it. The unsuccessful competitors may suffer all the 
pangs of disappointed ambition, but they are not usually 
impoverished or disgraced. A college boy who fails to 
win a prize is not on that account reduced to high school 
rank. A workman who fails to be promoted to the position 
of foreman does not lose his old job. Such emulation ad- 
vances some without ruining the rest. For that kind of 
competition an economic system founded wholly on co- 



I 



THE LAW OF TOOTH AND NAIL 175 

operation would offer splendid chances, with more publicity 
and fame for the winners than is now offered in business Hfe. 

But commercial competition differs in important ways 
from these salutary forms of human competition, and we 
ought to understand the difference. 

In the first place, the stakes are too large for safety. 
Any blessing may become a curse by growing excessive. 
A baby is a benediction ; triplets are a calamity. We are 
glad when the temperature of a room rises from forty to 
seventy degrees, but we object to a hundred and seventy. 
A pinch of salt and pepper is pleasant as a condiment, but a 
handful makes wry faces. So there is no great harm when 
boys play marbles ^^for keeps'' or old ladies play piquet for 
small stakes, but when clerks stake a week's wages on 
roulette or the races, it creates a moral situation about 
which great States enact laws. In business the stakes are 
enormous. They are larger absolutely, reckoned in money 
values, than ever before, because business is done on a 
larger scale. It is no longer a question of a few hundred 
dollars on a single deal, but of hundreds of thousands, and 
even milHons of dollars on a single transaction. The 
stakes are also excessive relatively, measured by their im- 
portance to the man who plays the game. The terrible 
game of competition always involves the possibility of busi- 
ness failure as the ending for one party. Therewith a man 
drops from the position of an independent man to that of a 
subordinate, from participation in profits to a mere salary, 
from large hopes to a contracted outlook. If he is past his 
youth, the drop may be final. It involves the social stand- 
ing of his family, the prospects of his children, even their 
health and length of life. If men gambled at faro for their 
fortunes, or bartered away their wives and children into 
peonage, the police would intervene. Yet any stringency 
of the market witnesses situations which are morally much 
like that. No human character ought to be submitted to 



176 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

such cruel tension and strain. Is it strange that men under 
such conditions cut wages in order to be able to lower prices, 
and submerge the men dependent on them in poverty and 
the women in prostitution? 

In the second place, in so far as emulation is valuable, 
its object is to gain human affection or honor. As soon as 
money enters, danger begins. For this reason money prizes 
are barred in amateur sportsmanship. In education, too, 
we have learned to dread the stimulation of prizes having 
money value. A race to the North Pole puts nations in 
a quiver as long as it is a contest for personal and national 
honor, but if the claimants exploit it as a business monop- 
oly, it becomes sordid and humihating. But in commer- 
cial competition money dominates the situation ; honor is 
secondary ; in many cases self-respect and the sense of 
honor have to be drugged temporarily in order to put 
a deal through. Success wins notoriety, but not honor. 
Are there any admiring plaudits in a city when two 
department stores put a third out of business and the 
old sign is taken down? Do men feel that they have 
witnessed a big, splendid human event when a large cor- 
poration swallows a smaller one ? Unusual business success 
in our country actually seems to cloud a man's reputation 
and put him on the defensive for his honor. Surely it is 
possible to conceive of a situation where men of organizing 
abihty would be the captains of great industrial teams com- 
prising all the workers of a given industry in the community, 
and where they would be rewarded for their achievements 
with little money and great honor, instead of big money and 
little honor. 

In the third place, commercial competition is not good 
sport. When competition is defended as a social prin- 
ciple, it is usually treated as a great game which braces 
and invigorates human nature and gives the prize to the 
best. Men say they do not care merely for money ; they 



THE LAW OF TOOTH AND NAIL 1 77 

are 'Splaying the game." Then let them quit marking 
the cards and loading the dice. Competitors in the game 
of business do not start even. Some have enormous 
special privilege which the others cannot possibly share. 
Is it a fair race to all when an electric company owns all 
the available water power in the State ? Is the Steel Trust, 
with its enormous capital and good will and its mineral 
holdings, running on a level with any young concern that 
wants to enter the race? Our economic system is based 
on a mass of special privilege. Private property in mines 
and real estate locations have institutionalized inequaHty. 
And then we invite men to play the game on the theory that 
it is fair competition between equals. Some have been 
through the pack and have taken all the cards that looked 
good to them, and then invite the rest to play the great 
game for the prizes of life with strict regard to the rules. 
In honorable athletics the man who has shown speed in one 
race is handicapped in the next, and so reduced to equality 
once more; or he is put into another class where he will 
once more be pitted against equals only. That system 
favors the young and seeks to develop new ability. On the 
other hand, in commercial competition it is the beginner 
who is handicapped in every way, and the star racers are 
furnished with motor cycles to make sure that they will 
henceforth always distance the crowd that runs on foot. 
Where is the educational value and the moral stimulus of 
that sort of sport ? 

For a century the doctrine of salvation by competition 
was the fundamental article in the working creed of the 
capitalistic nations. It was the ^^ natural theology" of 
industry, and no political economy was orthodox that did 
not preach it. Governments felt it would be a sin to inter- 
fere while competitors were having a Donnybrooke Fair. 
In theory it is still in effect in our country. Business men 
are indignant when workingmen refuse to permit unre- 

N 



178 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

strained competition among themselves. Government is 
supposed to punish combinations ^'in restraint of trade.'' 
But in practice competition is being hemmed in and tied 
up on all hands. None of the big leaders of business be- 
lieve in it. If they do, their faith is even farther removed 
from their works than usually. The doctrine of compe- 
tition was once historically useful because it helped to clear 
away an outgrown economic system and to substitute 
larger cooperating groups for the little groups of the handi- 
craft system. But that work has been done, and to-day 
competition has itself become an antiquated method which 
ties us down to petty and inefficient forms of teamwork. 
The polliwog is through with its tail and gills, and is anx- 
ious to grow legs and lungs, and sit on a stone in the pride 
of its froghood. But legislators, lawyers, and old gentle- 
men generally are anxiously trying to coax back the vanish- 
ing tail. The only valid defense for the wastefulness and 
inefficiency of the competitive system is that it protects 
the consumer against the voracity of the monopolist. That 
end is wholly laudable, but we shall have to find more 
effective means of attaining it than moving back the clock- 
hands that destiny is driving forward. 

Business is abandoning competition because it is in- 
efficient, and larger and more powerful forms of association 
and teamwork are being wrought out. Christianity should 
help to end competition because it is immoral. Its murder- 
ous effect in England at the beginning of the capitaHstic 
era is a matter of record. It has had much the same effect 
every time it invaded a new country or community. It 
is a short-sighted and suicidal policy. One nation after 
the other has had to hog-tie competition by government 
interference, inspection, and paternalism in the interests 
of safety and humanity. Competition as a principle is a 
denial of fraternity. In so far as it is allowed to do its 
unrestrained work, it establishes the law of tooth and nail, 



THE LAW OF TOOTH AND NAIL 1 79 

and brings back the age of savage warfare where every 
man's hand is against every man. It dechristianizes the 
social order. Whatever progress was achieved under the 
competitive system was secured, not by the competitive 
element in it, but by the fact that it allowed so large an 
application of the forces of association and teamwork. 
It behooves us to find forms of organization that will ex- 
pand the present narrow areas of cooperation and make 
them nation wide. Men who are in the same line of work 
must be so organized that they can emulate while they co- 
operate. Commercial competition has developed in our 
commercial communities the lower instincts of selfishness, 
covetousness, and craft. A Christian social order must be 
such that it will develop and educate mutual interest and 
good will, and equip workmates with that sense of comrade- 
ship and soHdarity to which they are entitled. 



CHAPTER V ; 

THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY * 

^^This is the essence of Capitalism, that two distinct 
social classes cooperate in the creation of goods; on the 
one side the capitalist class, which owns the necessary 
material factors of production, the machinery, the factories, 
the raw material, etc. ; on the other side the class of free ^ 
wage workers, who own the personal factor of production, 
their working abiUty, and nothing else. Now, all human 
production consists in applying this personal factor to the 
material factors. Therefore, what differentiates the cap- 
italistic system from all other methods of production is 
the fact that these two essential factors are represented by 
two distinct social classes." ^ 

Wherever our social ord^r has been modernized and in- 
dustrialized, these two classes confront each other in clear 
formation, and the relation between the two is the over- 
shadowing moral problem of our age. 

The capitalist class holds the position of industrial lead- 
ership. The capitalist is either himself the employer of 
labor and the manager of industry, or else he directly or 
indirectly appoints the managers, superintendents, and 
foremen who organize and command the industrial army. 
All power is exercised by his authority. 

Now, leadership is one of the indispensable forces and 
assets of human society. Humanity will never get beyond 
the need of it. The efficiency of any social organization 

^ Werner Sombart, professor at the University of Breslau, " Sozialismus und 
soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert," p. 4. 

180 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY l8l 

depends on its success in dethroning the incapable, putting 
the able individuals in positions of leadership, and properly 
harnessing them to the common service. In times of 
danger, or in occupations demanding swift decision and 
action, men have always invested their leaders with dicta- 
torial power and accepted stern disciphne as part of the 
day's work. If the regimentation of the workers in modern 
industry is simply leadership which aims at their maximimi 
efl&ciency, comfort, health, and prosperity, the workers 
must submit to the limitations of freedom imposed by 
modern industrial necessities. 

Even in that case leadership has potencies of evil. Power 
is the most subtle intoxicant known. Leadership easily 
verges into tyranny. Even if there is no motive of economic 
exploitation, men and women love to exercise power simply 
to see others yield to their superior force, and when they 
have grown wonted to power, they resent resistance even 
if it is just. For that reason all free States have watched 
jealously against any perpetuation of power on the part of 
temporary leaders. In politics we provide short terms of 
office in order to give opportunity for a new verdict of the 
people and a fresh grant of power. We have never allowed 
any President more than eight successive years of authority 
and are considering the advisibility of limiting the presi- 
dency to a single term of six years. Hard experience has 
developed the device of the Recall. Therefore if our in- 
dustrial organization embodied nothing but the leader- 
ship of the capable, there would still be need of checks and 
safeguards against the growth of tyranny. But what 
protection has industry developed analogous to the checks 
of political democracy? Do miners have any voice in 
the selection of the mine bosses ? Can the cotton spinners 
of a mill recall the superintendent who speeds up the ma- 
chinery beyond the hmit of safety and endurance ? 

Despotism is the permanent temptation of the strong, 



l82 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

even when their power is delegated and representative 
power. But in industry the master class are not represent- 
atives of labor ; they hold their power suo jure and Dei 
gratia. They own the property without which industry 
cannot go on. Without them Labor holds a lever without 
a fulcrum on which to rest it. Without the material factors 
of production Labor, physical and mental, would be Hke a 
paddle wheel revolving in a vacuum. This puts the ad- 
justment of power between the two great classes on a 
different footing than mere ability of leadership. 

By right of property capital is on the inside. It holds 
the buying pubHc at its mercy and plays tag with the omnip- 
otent State. The rest of us draw no rent from our castles 
in the air; our great corporations capitalize even their 
hopes and turn them into present profit. They perform the 
miracle of Cana every day, changing water into the wine 
of dividend-earning securities. They are so much master 
of the economic situation that they can turn their defeats 
into victories. As a result of the great anthracite coal 
strike of 1902 the coal barons were induced to pay the 
miners an advance of sixteen cents per ton, but my coal 
has since advanced by $1.30 per ton. Even dissolution 
and death seem to be good for the health of a Trust. 

Now if Capital can play with the Consumer who holds 
the purse and from whom its profits come, what will it 
do with Labor, which is dependent on it, not only for 
bread, but for the very chance to work for bread ? Capital 
turns its defeats into victory; Labor sees its hard- won 
victories slip away and turn into defeat. If the workers 
by organization, sacrifice, and good leadership win higher 
wages, they must pay them out again in higher prices for 
what they consume. If any hold a safe and highly paid 
position by virtue of special skill, the best technical talent 
that can be hired is busy devising machinery that will 
turn their work over to women or boys. If for once there 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 1 83 

are more jobs than men, steamship companies and other 
mysterious agencies bring cheap foreigners from the ends 
of the earth who seep through the levees of organized labor 
like a Mississippi flood and drive the native population 
from their jobs and their homes. 

Such power on one side and such weakness on the other 
constitute a solicitation to sin to which human nature 
ought never to be subjected. None of us is good enough 
to hold the Hyes of his fellow-men in the hollow of his 
hands and see them quiver at his smile or frown. Watch 
a file of men asking for work, and you will see men begging 
for a boon from a human god.^ If such power is habitually 
exercised by one social class over another, it will inevitably 
sap the sense of common humanity and create the feehng 
that a sort of semimorality is right and sufficient toward 
the subject class. If any difference of race, nationality, 
language, or religion is added to the economic chasm, as 
in the case of the negroes and immigrants, moral respon- 
sibihty is further lessened. Looking back across the ages, 
we can see these two classes always confronting each other, 
as master and slave, as lord and serf, as employer and work- 
man. Their relation was never without human warmth 
and moral nobility. It was probably always better than 
it looks in the retrospect. And yet, taking it all together, 
it is a record of sin. Theology tells us of a sin of origin, 
derived from Adam and transmitted from generation to 
generation. History too might teach a doctrine of heredi- 
tary sin, running by social tradition down the sin-cursed 

1 Here is the substance of a newspaper clipping, dated New York, Aug. 18, 
191 1. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company advertised for fifteen 
laborers. About 600 men formed in line in front of the yards at 98th Street 
and Third Avenue. William Swacott was one of the first. When the gates 
were opened to admit the applicants for work, there was a rush from the 
rear. Swacott lost his footing, fell on the pavement, and was stepped on 
by several hundred men before the police rescued him. At Harlem Hospital 
the doctors said he was injured internally. 



184 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

generations of man, the original sin of oppression and 
exploitation. 

Our own age has given a peculiar new twist to this 
ancient temptation to inhumanity that has always dogged 
the relation between master and man. It has deperson- 
alized the master. The redeeming feature of the relation 
in all its historic forms has been the human contact between 
the individuals of the two classes. No matter if one man 
was black and the other white, the one a slave and the 
other a Virginia gentleman, if the two worked and hunted, 
laughed and mourned together, their common humanity 
often got the better of the law and made them friends. 
Perhaps Satan foresaw that Christianity and democracy 
if once united would put a new heart into mankind which 
would no longer tolerate the old oppression. But if fra- 
ternity arrived, the jig was up for the Devil. So he in- 
vented the corporation. 

A corporation, as every lawyer knows, is an artificial 
person, begotten by the Law, a vast being composed of 
many individuals, with powers both greater and less than 
the sum of all its parts ; invisible and without the imbecili- 
ties of the body, immortal and yet without a soul. It 
is not tempted by wine, woman, or song Kke the rest of 
us, but its whole life is ruled and directed by one desire 
and passion which is never quenched nor satisfied, the lust 
for profits. It is created for profit ; it gets its life breath, 
its muscles and thews, its intellect, and its size by profit. 
It has a vast acquisitive mind, but no heart of pity nor 
bowels of compassion. This uncanny race of incorporeal 
but corporate persons has begun to multiply among us of 
late and to grow to unearthly size, towering among us 
mortals as the skyscraper towers among the plain old 
homes of our cities. It is doing our work for us with giant 
hands and doing it well, but it demands to be fed with 
profit, and its hunger is insatiable. 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 185 

The corporation, which is fast becoming the agency 
through which we manage all our large affairs, interposes 
between the individuals of the owning class and the individ- 
uals of the working class in such a way that human kind- 
ness and good will get in a minimum of influence. The 
stockholders are scattered absentee owners. A corporation 
might be composed of retired missionaries, peace advocates, 
and dear old ladies, but their philanthropy would cause 
no vibrations in the business end of the concern. On the 
other hand, the directors would never be in doubt that 
4 per cent is a more acceptable rate of semiannual dividend 
than 3 per cent, and by the time that desire for substantial 
profit reached the manager and superintendents, it might 
be transformed into a cut in wages, a speeding up of the 
machinery, a cruel system of fines, or any other form of 
heartlessness.^ Ruskin mockingly called the ^^ economic 
man" that did business in the orthodox political economies 
'^a covetous machine." The corporation is that thing. It 
does not smart under public disapprobation like a business 
man. Like the judge in the parable, it feareth not God 
and regardeth not man. It doesn't have to have religion, 
for even God cannot put a corporation in hell. 

A civil engineer can calculate with fair accuracy the 
amount of water pressure which ,a certain dam can safely 
stand. He may be a little out of the way ; he may say ten 
feet of water, when really it will stand eleven ; but he could 
predict with absolute certainty that it would collapse if 
twenty feet of water were piled behind it. Human nature 
is wonderfully variable in its individual expressions, but 
fairly constant in the bulk, when taken by the million. 
Statistics flow on as evenly as a great river with periodical 
rises and falls ; so many births, deaths, marriages, murders, 
and suicides year in and year out. A moral engineer can 

^ See the chapter on "Sinning by Syndicate" in Professor E. A. Ross's 
brilliant little book, "Sin and Society." 



l86 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

never predict how much pressure of temptation a given 
individual will stand, but he can predict with absolute 
certainty that human nature in the mass will collapse under 
such temptations as our economic system puts upon it. A 
given employer may regard his workmen with genuine human 
affection, while all his business interests bid him regard them 
as mere units of labor making money for him. But the mass 
of human nature in the business world has followed the line 
of least resistance and acted as the situation prompted. 

As one looks across the industrial nations to observe the 
condition of the working class, he sees considerable diver- 
sity of income and independence in different nations and 
trades, and yet withal there is a certain uniformity of im- 
pression throughout. It is always a class under pressure. 
Even where Labor is strong and well organized, it is like 
a man holding up a heavy piece of timber with his hands, 
with every muscle tense and the sweat running down his 
body. All the costly organization of labor, the privations 
borne during strikes often extending for many months, the 
fury of occasional riots, the secret violence, the slugging of 
strike breakers, the magnificent sacrifices of great bodies 
of workers for those who are out on strike in some notable 
cause, the patient and wise efforts of leaders to secure some 
slight improvement in the conditions of labor, are over- 
whelming evidence that a weak class is struggling against 
a strong class, and that the odds are against the workers. 
The great strikes that get notoriety, like the shirt waist 
strike in New York, the garment workers' strike in Chicago, 
the strike of the steel workers at South Bethlehem, the 
strike of the miners in Westmoreland (which lasted for 
sixteen months and finally failed), simply heave up and 
turn to the dayHght conditions that had long existed and 
which continue to exist elsewhere. 

Take the strike at South Bethlehem in 1910 as an in- 
stance. Here were nine thousand men making steel for a 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 1 87 

wealthy corporation in one of the great protected industries 
of Pennsylvania. More than half of them worked twelve 
hours a day, and nearly all the others between ten and 
eleven hours, with frequent overtime. By the device of a 
time bonus system the work was speeded up and men had 
to earn the bonus to get the wages prevailing elsewhere. 
The foremen got large bonuses for big outputs, and that 
made some of them drivers of the men. In addition, be- 
tween 28 per cent and 43 per cent of the men worked seven 
days in the week. Furthermore, whenever the day and 
night shift turned about, the seven-day workers had to 
work a shift of twenty-four hours of labor without rest. 
Sixty-one per cent earned $2.16 for a twelve-hour day; 
31.9 per cent earned less than $1.68 in twelve hours. This 
is a wage scale that leaves no option to the common labor- 
ers but the boarding-boss method of Hving, with many 
men to the room. (Let those who know ponder that.) 
In return for these wages the workers incurred some risk. 
In 1909 there were 927 injuries in the Bethlehem plant; 
twenty-one men lost their lives. When the strike began, 
none of the men were members of any labor organization. 
The union to which the men would naturally belong had 
been systematically forced out of the works in 1883. I^ 
the course of the strike the men organized, but ^4t is prob- 
ably only a short time when these organizations will lapse, as 
it is one of the avowed principles of the Steel Company to 
discourage the organization of its employees.'' The men 
did not demand the recognition of their union, and that 
question played no part in the strike. It began when three 
machinists on behalf of their fellows protested against the 
Sunday labor exacted of so many. They were discharged for 
standing up for the Decalogue and the common welfare.^ 

^ We have two trustworthy reports on the Bethlehem strike : one by the 
U. S. Bureau of Labor, the other by a special committee (Charles Stelzle, 
Josiah Strong, and Paul U. Kellogg) of the Social Service Commission of the 
Federal Council of the Churches. 



1 88 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

This strike laid bare the chronic conditions of one im- 
portant group of industrial workers, but it is fairly sympto- 
matic of the whole situation. The Autocrat of the Break- 
fast Table thought an archangel could pick up a pebble on 
the beach and deduce the laws of the universe from it. It 
requires no angelic wisdom to read the situation of indus- 
trial labor from one such record. When the clinical 
thermometer registers 102 degrees under the tongue, the 
doctor does not have to measure the temperature of the 
toes ; he knows that the whole body is at fever heat. In 
the social body there is no such equilibrium as in the human 
body. Cleanliness and good will may reign next door to 
tyranny and dirt. But if this ^ kittle town of Bethlehem'' 
was wholly exceptional, why did not the men get out and 
go elsewhere ? Labor to-day is at least not bound to the 
mill as the agricultural serf was bound to the soil. It is 
because the workers are pent up by approximately similar 
conditions elsewhere, and only the strongest can climb out 
of the blind alley in which they are jammed. A corpora- 
tion paying 40 per cent dividends would not reduce its 
male employees to an average of $10 a week if they could 
easily get more elsewhere. The men then have to figure 
out if they can support a wife and a home on that amount. 
One sociological expert will tell them that it takes $10.38 
to do it ; another thinks it can be done for $9.67, and they 
would be 33 cents to the good if they look sharp. It seems 
a close gamble. The report of the Chicago Vice Commis- 
sion revealed conditions that staggered even those of us 
who thought they knew something of vice, and was fit to 
plunge any one who loves his kind in days of gloom. The 
first thought is of the girls who are pushed by poverty, 
physical weariness, loneliness, the feminine love of finery 
and pleasure, or faithfulness to their dependent relatives, 
into the mantraps of commercialized vice and are speeded 
up in their degrading services as in a factory. But I pity 



1 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 1 89 



also the thousands of men for whom fifty cents purchases 
a brief and ghastly approximation to the love of wife and 
home. O Christ in heaven, who brought thy brothers to 
that point ? 

In a single issue of a weekly paper that has just come 
to hand ^ I find the following items as part of the general 
news: 125,000 transport workers had tied up the port 
of London, and orders had been telegraphed for a national 
strike in all the British ports. Post-election riots had 
broken out throughout Belgium, accompanied by violent 
strikes on a large scale in which sociahst orators were hissed 
because they counseled moderation and return to work; 
the riots were a protest against the victory of the clerical 
and conservative parties which involved that the CathoHc 
schools were still to draw support from the public funds, 
and that the upper classes were still to be armed with a 
plural ballot to vote down the more numerous lower classes.^ 
In the Hungarian Diet eighty- two members of the Opposi- 
tion Party had been violently ejected from the Chamber 
for obstructing the proceedings; their action was part of 
an effort to win the suffrage for the working class ; a great 
labor strike at Budapest for the same end had just subsided. 
The poHce in Newark, N.J., had fought a street battle 
with strikers, women fighting with the strikers, and many 
persons were injured with gunshot wounds by the police. 
A referendum in nine craft unions of shop employees on 
railroads running west of Chicago had resulted in a two- 
thirds or three-fourths vote in eight of them to strike in 
sympathy with the industrial union strike on the Ilhnois 
Central and Harriman Lines; another effort was to be 
made to get a conference with the general managers of 

^ The Public, June 14, 191 2. 

2 Men of property have two votes ; professional men and high ofl&cials 
have three: 993,070 citizens have one vote each; 395,866 have 791,732 
votes; 308,683 have 926,049. 



190 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the united roads; a previous request had been denied. 
The employees of the Boston Elevated had voted 1398 
to 8 to strike ; riotous attacks on cars followed ; traffic on 
all the electric Unes in and around Boston was suspended 
partly or completely ; 100 Wellesley girls were said to have 
agreed not to ride on the Elevated and to give the money 
saved to the strike fund. A riot between strikers and strike 
breakers had occurred at the freight yards of the C.B. & Q. 
in Chicago in connection with the freight handlers' strike ; 
500 men were engaged in the riot; one striker was des- 
perately wounded, another killed. The Illinois Central 
was preparing to ^'cut a melon" regarding Lakeshore real 
estate at Chicago, but it was not yet clear who was to get a 
slice. The manager of the New York Clearing House had 
testified before the Pujo Congressional Committee that 
five men control the Clearing House, and the Clearing 
House controls the financial interests of the whole country. 
(Perhaps these two last items have some remote bearing 
on the others.) 

This is the casual grist of a single week. If such a survey 
says nothing to us, let us hunt up Pharaoh in his own place 
and call him brother. He thought the social unrest in 
Egypt was due to the excess of leisure among the Israelite 
Bricklayers' Union and to the mischievous agitation of 
two walking delegates, Moses and Aaron. Our govern- 
ment rests on the assumption that the common man on 
the whole judges sensibly on affairs that concern him. But 
how can he be trusted to govern a nation if in his own trade 
he strikes madly at mere shadows? The class of men 
who are now chafing in the world-wide struggles between 
capital and labor is the same class and breed of men who 
settled our country and built up our nation. Our continent 
from ocean to ocean bears eloquent testimony to the willing- 
ness and capacity of the plain man, provided he has a chance 
and a motive to work. Dis3atisfaction among the working 



THE LAST INTRENCHJVIENT ' OF AUTOCRACY 191 

class is not confined to the disgruntled incapables. The 
entire trades-union movement is an institutionaHzed ex- 
pression of dissatisfaction, and the members of the unions 
are the ehte of their class. The world-wide socialist move- 
ment is nothing if not a protest of the working class. The 
growing unrest has kept step with the growing intelligence 
and self-respect of the workers. Time was when they 
were so stupid and cowed that they accepted poverty and 
inequaHty as their inevitable lot. Democracy has brought 
them a great spiritual awakening. Education has per- 
formed for the torpid classes of society the miracle Elisha 
performed on the Shunamite's son when he stretched his 
body over the body of the boy, eye to eye and mouth to 
mouth, until the flesh of the child waxed warm, ^'and the 
child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes.'' 
The working class has sneezed seventy times seven times. 
It looks like convulsions, but it means the awakening of life. 
It is not true that the working class as a whole is need- 
lessly prone to use violent means to right their grievances. 
^^The endurance of the inequahties of Hfe by the poor is the 
marvel of human society." ^ I read of the increasing in- 
cHnation to use ^^ direct action" and sabotage with a sink- 
ing of the heart, not only on account of the immediate 
damage that will be done and the spread of lawlessness, 
but because of the harm it will do to the cause of labor. 
I am Christian enough to beHeve that evil cannot be over- 
come with evil, and that the recoil of violence will usually 
more than offset any immediate advantage gained by it. 
But I do not wonder that men resort to physical force. 
My wonder is that men whose physical force is the only 
force they know how to handle have used it so Httle. They 
have been slower to resort to violence than women in the 
agitation for the suffrage. If we could pick out a thousand 
employers who in some way have been conspicuous for their 

^ James A. Froude. 



192 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

opposition against organized labor, put them all in one 
mill town together, subject them to the average conditions 
of industrial workers, leave them just as able and energetic 
as they are now, but somehow deprive them of the hope 
of escaping from this condition and lot, they would have a 
rampant labor organization in running order inside of a 
week, and the world would listen to an explosion before 
a month was up. If they could no longer use the physical 
force of constabulary, deputy sheriffs, Pinkertons, and 
miUtia, they would fall back on their own physical force, 
and organizers of the Federation of Labor would come in to 
counsel steadiness and peaceable methods. 

If we found in the reading of history that a given nation 
or class through a long term of years was rising again and 
again in some form of forcible revolt, we should be justified 
in assuming that it must have been without orderly means 
of redress and that peaceable agitation was suppressed. 
Further study would surely prove the truth of the assump- 
tion. If any one doubts whether the violence of the work- 
ing class is due to repression, let him read the history of 
trades-unionism and of socialism. These two are the 
organized forms of orderly protest, the one industrial, 
the other poHtical. Both have been met with persistent 
efforts of repression by the employing class and by govern- 
ments. The industrial workers have long ago discovered 
that the lone worker is helpless when he confronts the em- 
ployer of hundreds. The best and ablest among them have 
worked hard to overcome the short-sighted selfishness of 
their fellows and to create effective organizations. How 
profoundly they feel the need of their unions is shown by 
the fact that the demand for the recognition of the union 
comes up persistently in nearly every labor conflict, like 
the bell buoy in a dangerous channel rising again with 
tireless peal whenever a wave has submerged it. If the 
labor struggle were all on the other side of the globe, and 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 193 

we learned that these men are merely demanding the right 
to deal with their employers as a body by orderly representa- 
tion, we Americans would hold that of course they had a 
right to organize if they wanted to. Yet that right has 
been denied them. Laws passed against pohtical conspiracy 
were applied if several workmen quit work together. In 
our own country powerful associations of employers have 
united to cripple and suppress the organizations of labor. 
Employers have refused audience to the business agents 
empowered and paid by the unions, on the ground that 
these persons were outsiders and that they would deal only 
with a committee of their own men. But the individuals 
of such a committee would be dependent on the employers 
for their bread; the more ably and fearlessly they would 
conduct the negotiations on behalf of their fellows, the more 
liable would they be to make themselves obnoxious to their 
employers and to be dismissed later as trouble makers. 
If the United States were negotiating a treaty with Russia, 
would Russia demand that the American plenipotentiary 
must be a Russian subject and in Russian pay before she 
would consent to negotiate ? If Russia even suggested 
such a thing, it would serve notice on all the world that 
America had become a subject nation. 

This chapter set out with the proposition that the rela- 
tion between the two great industrial classes, the class of 
the owners and managers on the one side and the class of 
the industrial workers on the other, is the great moral 
problem of our age. Our discussion has reminded us of 
the fact, which every intelligent man knows, that this rela- 
tion is one of unrest and increasing dissatisfaction to both 
sides. An unrest so universal and so durable cannot be 
set down to mere personal and local causes, but must be 
due to some constitutional maladjustment in the moral 
relation of these two great classes. The grievances of the 
working class are ma!inly two. They feel that they are 



194 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

being deprived by the more powerful class of part of their 
just share in the proceeds of their joint labor, and in many 
cases are being compelled to labor too fast, too long, and 
under conditions harmful to their physical and mental 
health. Therefore they raise the charge of injustice and 
exploitation. They also feel that they are not being treated 
as free men and of equal worth with the other class. There- 
fore they raise the charge of oppression. The two things 
are closely related. The weak have always been kept un- 
free in order that they might be exploited. The demand 
for manhood suffrage in Hungary^ the protest against 
plural suffrage in Belgium, and the demand for recognition 
of the union in America are demands for freedom, but if 
granted, these rights will serve as a protection against 
exploitation. 

Back of all material demands in the labor movement is 
the spiritual demand for a fuller and freer manhood. If 
the wages of the workmen were doubled, but were given 
them in a spirit of condescension or contempt, as we throw 
a bone to a dog, would they be content? The unrest of 
our American workingmen is in part at least the unrest of 
men who know liberty and are forced to live in unfreedom. 
Most of our relations in America are on a footing of democ- 
racy. When men meet on the street, in the cars, in the 
lodge, in church, in the college class room, at the polls, 
they meet on a footing of equahty, however widely they 
differ in wealth or ability. On the other hand, the relation 
of employer and employee is still frankly undemocratic. 
Every business concern is a little monarchy. It may be 
a just and benevolent monarchy, better and happier than 
most democracies, but it is not based on freedom and 
equal rights. In our economic relations we stand now 
where we stood in our political relations before the advent 
of democracy. Everywhere else autocracy is on the re- 
treat, or creeping back under cover to regain its lost forti- 



THE LAST INTEENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 195 

fications. In business the autocratic principle is still in 
full possession, unshaken and unterrified, with its flag flying 
from every battlement. Business is the last intrench- 
ment of autocracy, and wherever democracy is being beaten 
back, the sally is made from that citadel. 

The industrial unrest is not due to the badness of men, 
but to their relish and hunger for applied Christianity. 
They have tasted democracy and found it good, and they 
can never again be content with any relation that denies 
them freedom and equality. They refuse to live a double 
Kfe, ^'half slave and half free,'' and the refusal is wholly 
to the credit of their morals. We must either deprive 
them of their other liberties, deny them education, and 
cow them into contentment, or else democratize the in- 
dustrial life too. 

Fortunately, prudence runs with righteousness in this 
matter. It always takes faith to believe in freedom, but 
in the long run freedom always justifies our faith in her. 
To a shortsighted profit maker prison labor might seem 
the ideal form of production. No labor agitators, no strikes, 
no nonsense, allowed, and a minimum of expense to eat into 
your balance — what a paradise of succulent profits ! Cor- 
porations having prison labor contracts set forth these 
advantages in suggestive terms. Yet in fact prison labor 
is the dearest of all labor, and if all workmen were reduced 
to that condition, the decrease of output and increase of 
expense would bankrupt the nation in six months. The 
cheapest labor is highly intelligent and free labor. Slavery 
has disappeared, not simply because it contradicted the 
moral convictions of mankind, but because it was inefficient 
labor and unable to stand against the competition of the 
free man working for his own good. The slave could be 
trusted only with the crudest tools and employed at the 
coarsest forms of agriculture, and the expense of overseers, 
man hunts^ and assassinations had to be figured into his 



196 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

keep. The only motive that wrought on him with full 
force was the fear of punishment. The higher motives 
that give the perpetual spring and keenness of edge to our 
work — the hope of economic advancement, the desire for 
honor, the sense of duty, and the love of work for its own 
sake — scarcely touched him. 

Our own industrial workers are only semiefFicient be- 
cause they are still but semifree. They are not partners, 
but hirelings, and have the indifference of the hireling shep- 
herd to whom Jesus alluded. They too are impelled only 
by the lower motives and therefore have to be driven by 
overseers. As long as they can hold their job and draw 
their pay, why should they exert themselves to increase 
the dividends of the company, of which they get nothing ? 
The leakages in the efficiency of wage labor are precisely 
at those points where it most resembles slave labor. As 
soon as a man gets a chance to be his own master and work 
for his own good, there is almost always an increase in 
interest and efficiency. There will be a bound upward 
in efficiency when we have found the way of making our 
wageworkers labor copartners. In the industrial rivalry 
of nations that nation will finally come out ahead which 
gives its workers the largest amount of physical health and 
security, of intellectual initiative, and of social freedom. 
One reason why the South broke down in our Civil War 
was that its slave labor had kept it industrially incompetent. 
Wars are fought with iron, and the South did not know 
how to work the iron that lay in mass under its soil. Un- 
freedom means imbecility. Freedom works because it is 
essentially moral and founded on the will of God. Un- 
freedom is the favorite device of greed, but it frustrates 
its own purposes because it is fundamentally immoral. 

All higher philosophical thought agrees in the conviction 
that freedom is an essential condition of real manhood. 
There is no true individuahty without it, GladstQU^ said 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 1 97 

that one of the chief lessons which Kfe had taught him was 
that freedom is a good for its own sake, apart from anything 
that might be attained through freedom. The unsatisfied 
longing for liberty in past history is one of the great tragic 
facts of human life. The spread of liberty is the glory of 
the modern world. Our own nation was dedicated to the 
principle of freedom at its birth, and rededicated to it by 
a baptism of blood. Whenever any other nation is stirring 
uneasily under despotism or is trying to break the strangle- 
hold of ancient tyranny, an instinctive thrill of sympathy 
runs through our American people, showing that we have 
not forgotten our divine calling. As for our reHgion, — 
the passion for freedom is a distinctive mark of genuine 
Christianity. Paul summed up the genius of the new reh-, 
gion in contrast to the old : ^^ Where the spirit of the Lord 
is there is Hberty." Jesus has been the great emancipator 
of humanity. Wherever his spirit has really touched any 
human soul, it has been made free in some way. Wherever 
it has touched any prostrate and shackled nation, there 
has been a stir of fresh life and manhood. 

These things we know, yet we have allowed a great and 
growing class of our people to be submerged in economic 
unfreedom so deep that ^'hberty of contract'' has become 
an instrument of enslavement for them, and the State is 
compelled to Hmit their Hberty in order to save them from 
being utterly ground up. Economic freedom is an essential 
part of human freedom. Without economic independence 
pohtical and reHgious liberty become hollow and fragile, 
a reminiscence and a mocking sham. A woman has a 
right to herself. When she gives herself freely, it is the 
highest gift she can 'make. If she is compelled by force or 
need to submit to the will of another, and yields to necessity 
what should be yielded to love alone, it makes her a tool 
and degrades her womanhood. A man likewise has a right 
to himself. He must be free to develop his own personality 



198 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

and to contribute his work to the common good in free 
exchange and interaction with his fellows. If he becomes 
a mere tool to serve the will of another and exists for the 
other man's profit, his freedom is gone and his manhood 
degraded. Whoever of us can bear to see his fellow-men 
so used without shame or protest, sins against the man- 
hood in himself and against God. We have accepted the 
Statue of Liberty from a younger sister republic and have 
set it at the gateway of our land for all the world to see. 
Therewith we have pawned our honor to the nations that 
this country shall be a home of freedom. Yet in the great 
city behind the statue thousands of men nightly sleep in 
the fetid air and amid the vermin of cheap lodging houses 
for five and even for two cents a night. Those men may 
be American citizens, but they are not free men. They 
are galley slaves of poverty. 

A subject working class, without property rights in 
the instruments of their labor, without a voice in the man- 
agement of the shops in which they work, without juris- 
diction over the output of their production is a contradic- 
tion of American ideals and a menace to American institu- 
tions. As long as such a class exists in our country, our 
social order is not christianized. Civilization has now 
reached the point where power must shift from the ruling 
class to the people in industry as it has shifted in the politi- 
cal constitution of States. We need industrial democracy. 

With all its imperfections democracy has caused a tre- 
mendous improvement in poHtical morality. Theorists 
sometimes doubt the value of political democracy; the 
common sense of the people never wavers about it. When 
the people have the right of free speech, free assembly, 
and a free press; when they have an orderly expression 
of their will through a parliament ; when the monarch no 
longer has the right to tax the people at will and to spend 
their hard-earned money on his favorites and prostitutes, — 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 1 99 

then bad kings begin to behave themselves, good kings 
remain good, and in any case the character of the king 
is no longer of such fatal importance, because the people 
can take care of themselves. Under an absolute monarchy- 
like that of Russia Christian people may feel that the great- 
est thing they can pray for is that Providence may make 
the oldest boy baby of the Romanoff family a good baby. 
But most of us will agree that a Douma with powerful 
elbows would be worth more to Russia than a good little 
prince. 

So in industry we need a constitutional increase of free- 
dom and power for the working class even more than we 
need good and kind employers. The generous, old-fash- 
ioned employer is apt to die or he has to sell out to a trust. 
The clean-handed manager of a corporation may be dis- 
missed by the directors because he ^^does not get results." 
As long as the happiness of the workers rests on the per- 
sonal character of employers, it is insecure. What is 
granted as a favor when the directors feel cheerful may be 
canceled when they feel hard up. We must set our faces 
toward a thoroughgoing change in the relation between the 
two great economic classes. Nothing else will serve. 

This is perhaps the most searching test that can be ap- 
plied to the Christian character of a business man to-day : 
Is he willing to aid and speed the transition to industrial 
democracy? No man is moral unless his heart is set on 
a reign of freedom and justice. No man is a mature 
Christian unless he is willing to suffer personal loss to bring 
in freedom and justice. 

Business men often feel that radical social thought is 
cruelly unfair to them in charging them with wrong in all 
their relations. Individuals certainly have been hit most 
unfairly. But really those who have learned to take the 
social point of view are far more patient and lenient judges 
than those who have only individualistic morality to 



200 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

guide their judgment. The latter see nothing but personal 
wrong-doings behind the miseries of industrial life. They 
thunder against the ^^malefactors of great wealth" and 
are eager to get the grip of the criminal law on the officers 
of corporations. On the other hand, those who have learned 
to understand the organic unity of society know how pro- 
foundly the individual is conditioned in all his acts and 
thoughts by the social life that makes and molds him, 
and sets his goal and his Kmits.^ They see more evil than 
others see, but they can feel compassion for the man who 
does it. And when they see a man in the midst of the auto- 
cratic temper and customs of his class sincerely reaching 
out for justice and fraternity, they can ' appreciate his 
moral quality at its proper value. Socialists are bound 
by their own doctrine of ^^ economic determinism'' to regard 
every man who overcomes the pressure of his material 
interests even by a little as a sort of spiritual miracle. If 
he is a member of the master class, and yet treats his workers 
with real human fellow-feeling; if law and the traditions 
of his class allow him to exploit them, and he willingly 
pays union wages or a little more ; if competition presses 
him and he protects them against its effects as long as he 
can, — then he deserves the lasting respect of all intelligent 
socialists. 

Christianity will not let him off so easily. It lays down 
the doctrine of moral freedom and personal accountability. 
For whatever freedom and power a man has, he must an- 
swer to God. ^^To whom much is given, from him much 
is required." That certainly applies to modern business 
men. The evolution of industry has thrown all power 
their way, and they have eagerly taken all that was offered, 
and more. Then they cannot complain if much is required 
of them. The case is up to the business community at 

* John Spargo explains the mercifulness of socialist criticism in his "Sub- 
stance of Socialism," pp. 138-162. 



THE LAST INTRENCHMENT OF AUTOCRACY 20I 

present. They are in charge of the vineyard, and God is 
sending frequent and urgent word to inquire for his share 
of the output under their management. If they cannot 
cleanse our industry of despotism and exploitation, they 
must not be surprised if he terminates their lease of power. 
To make wages small in order to make dividends large 
may be common practice, but perhaps the Almighty takes 
a more serious view of it. Of three sins the Bible says 
that they cried to heaven. The first was the sin of Cain : 
^^The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the 
ground." The second was the sin of Sodom: the cry of 
it ^^came up to God." The third is the exploitation of 
the working class in their weakness: ^'Behold the hire of 
the laborers who mowed your fields, which has been with- 
held by you, crieth out, and the cries of them that have 
reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of hosts." 



CHAPTER VI 

THE REIGN OF THE MH^DLEMAN 

When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Where was then the middleman ? 

With the exception of one questionable personage who 
persuaded them to try a new kind of fruit, there wasn't 
any. They produced for their own needs, and some of us 
feel that we are camping near the gate of Edenland when 
we can bring in food we have raised by our own labor, and 
see our wife prepare it and our children eat it with us. 

Nor was there any one to intervene between producer 
and consumer in the old-fashioned village Kfe when the 
smith and the weaver exchanged their products as each 
had need of the other's skill. With the appearance of 
the middleman a new moral factor entered the situation. 
The trader has always been the advance agent of civiKza- 
tion. He awakened new desires in the breast of the lazy 
savage and made him work. He sharpened the wits of 
all he dealt with in the dear school kept by experience. 
But his name has never been a synonym for honesty,^ and 
the admiration we all feel for his cleverness has often been 
embroidered with maledictions. Will the trader ever be 
Christianized? Will the biggest strawberries ever be at 
the bottom of the box ? 

^ " A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong, 
And a trader shall not be judged free from sin." 
''As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings of the stones, 
So doth sin press in between buying and selling." 

Ecclesiasticus xxvi. 29, and xxvii, 2. 
202 



THE REIGN OF THE MmDLEMAN 203 

In primitive communities the trader was a more or less 
happy accident that occasionally lent a new flavor and 
tang to life. To-day he sits at the center of things and all 
tilings revolve around him except the solar system. For 
our business men are all middlemen; they stand between 
social groups and mediate between them. The farmer, 
the miner, the fisherman, the trapper come to the business 
man with their products, and he buys them. He turns to 
us who need bread, coal, fish, or fur and sells them to us 
— at a profit. He organizes the workers in factories and 
buys their work — at a profit. He organizes the buyers 
in stores, routes, and mail-order systems, and sells them the 
product of that work — at a profit. He organizes the 
small savings of the people in banks and sells the use of 
their money to others — at a profit. He looms up huge 
and wonderful as the real master of modern Hfe. Of him, 
and through him, and unto him are all things. If all 
business men could be rolled up and compounded in one 
huge person, he would be the god of this world. Our pres- 
ent economic system is the apotheosis of the middleman. 

The business man is the steward of our national house- 
hold. Is his work efficient and honest? We can say 
heartily that it is done more efficiently than any ruling 
class has ever done it before. Compared with the feudal 
lords who used to own the means of production and boss 
the workers in the agricultural age, our modern lords of 
industry are a wonderfully intelligent and serviceable 
class of men. Since they have taken charge of our civiliza- 
tion, a square mile of land sustains more men, a human 
life lasts longer, and a day's work turns out more goods 
than ever before. And our business in the main is honest 
business. If it were not so, the bottom would have dropped 
out of our social order before this, for our business rests on 
good faith and confidence more than ever before. As a 
suspension bridge hangs by cables, so business hangs on 



204 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

a network of fiduciary relations. Innumerable business 
men have managed their business in such a way that after 
years of buying and selling, they have the sincere liking and 
esteem of their customers. Even those who slip over 
into tricky methods or sell shoddy goods would prefer 
to do clean business if only their competitors or customers 
would let them. 

If the sins committed in the relation between business 
men and their customers are simply the inevitable slips of 
weak human nature, we can afford to be patient and must 
try to increase the efficiency of the Sunday schools in teach- 
ing the Ten Commandments. In handling crockery we 
must allow for some breakage. Even in the strictest social- 
ist State boys will presumably swap knives and men will 
trade horses, and one will take and the other will get left. 

But is dishonesty merely an accident in business? Or 
is business of such a nature that it invites to unfraternal 
dealings? Is good Business always being corrupted by 
wicked human nature, or is human nature the saving ele- 
ment in a system of business that ought by its own laws 
to turn out a far larger percentage of immoral action? 
Are business men in need of personal improvement, or is 
Business as such in need of constitutional readjustments ? 
Or both ? 

When seller meets buyer, their relation calls out the 
selfish motives in both and leaves the finer social motives 
quiescent. 

Parents would have the best possible chance to overreach 
their children and palm off adulterated food on them if 
they were so inclined, for the children are trustful and igno- 
rant. Yet we are assured on good authority that even a 
poor sort of father is not apt to give a stone when his son 
asks for a loaf of bread. He loves his child. There is no 
such love of kinship between buyer and seller, and so there 
may be chalk in the bread and terra alba in the little boy's 



THE REIGN OF THE MIDDLEMAN 20$ 

candy when he comes out of the store. Neither has the 
seller that sense of official responsibility which constrains 
the pastor to care for his people, the ship captain for his 
passengers, the physician for his patient, and the lawyer 
for his cUent. The members of a group often develop a 
powerful sense of solidarity which forbids overreaching one 
of their fellows. For instance, to a company of starving 
Arctic explorers it came as a terrible shock that one of their 
number had been secretly taking more than his share of 
the rations. There is no such soHdarity between buyer 
and seller. The Law also touches the Httle fraudulent 
tricks of trade Hghtly. The municipal regulations devel- 
oped under the influence of the medieval guilds dealt very 
severely with bad workmanship. A baker or cobbler was 
liable to be drawn through the streets of the town on a 
tumbril or exposed in the pillory with his defective loaf 
or boots hung round his neck for all to see. Capitalism 
promptly abolished these restrictions on the freedom of 
trade, so that fear of the law is no strong motive to help the 
weak in resisting temptation. The unwritterx law of cus- 
tom likewise leaves the seller ample room to operate. 
Caveat emptor ! Let the buyer look out for himself. Thus 
love, duty, fellowship, law, and custom stand to one side 
when buyer and seller have it out between them. 

On the other hand, the selfish motives are hard at work. 
Business is under the one great law of Profit. It is not 
carried on primarily to supply men with wholesome goods 
but to make a profit for the dealer. Almost all business 
men would prefer to sell good and wholesome things, but 
if they had the alternative between selling soHd goods at 
slight profit, or flashy goods at a heavy profit, they would 
probably console themselves that the public demands the 
latter, and sell them. Their natural desire for profitable 
business is stimulated by the prod of competition, and by 
the general spirit and pace of profit-making business all 



2o6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

around them. If the margin of profit is being cut down by- 
competitors, it can be widened by tampering a Httle with 
the goods furnished. The only restraint is that of pru- 
dence; the tricks of the trade must not injure sales or 
anger customers. Thou shalt not kill the goose that lays 
the golden eggs. 

Under such conditions ordinary integrity becomes an 
heroic virtue. A business man who never overreaches a 
customer is mentioned with a hush of respect. It is wholly 
to the credit of the characters bred in American life that 
a large, and probably an increasing volume of business is 
done above board and honestly. But it would be idle to 
assert that the temptation to overreach is not a persistent 
pressure in the life of a large percentage of business men. 

The temptation to overreach is all the more insinuating 
nowadays because it is harder for the buyer to protect 
himself than in former times. The ignorance of the buyer 
has always been the opportunity of the trader. Fortunes 
used to be made in the African trade when negro kings 
eagerly traded an elephant tusk for six yards of red cotton 
and an entrancing string of glass beads. But in the good 
old times people used to have a fair knowledge of the few 
staples sold in their community. On the other hand, how 
helpless we are when we finger woolen or silk goods and 
wonder how much wool there is in the wool and how heavily 
the silk is loaded. It is so infernally well done. The mod- 
ern dealer has all the resources of chemistry and applied 
science to aid him in meeting the customer's suspicions. 
We have heard the fame of the wooden nutmegs sold by 
the Yankee peddler long ago. What a crude scheme ! 
They had no taste of nutmeg and would be detected as 
soon as they touched the grater. That peddler could never 
travel that route again. Your modern Yankee would 
make up an elegant nutmeg that would taste and grate 
like the genuine article, and he could sell the same thing to 



THE REIGN OF THE Mn)DLEMAN 207 

the same woman over and over, even if Dr. Wiley told her 
not to buy it. Why not? We make up a very salable 
sort of coffee that hasn't a genuine coffee bean in it ; only 
dry peas and cocoa shells. Our mothers could tell when 
milk was old because it was sour. To-day the refrigerator 
and a dose of formalin or formaldehyde will take care of 
the bacillus that curdles the milk, and the ptomaine can- 
not be detected by any test of taste or smell with which 
the Lord has equipped a housewife. 

Weights plugged with putty, falsely adjusted scales, 
measures with false bottoms or dented sides are ancient 
but ever youthful devices. Our cities employ officers es- 
pecially to hunt them down, but they thrive like EngKsh 
sparrows. The inspectors in New York City confiscated 
3906 of them in three months of 1910, and Indianapolis 
totaled over 13,000 of them in four and a half years. 
The modern factory packs goods in packages and bottles 
ready for retailing, and that gives a chance for many sHght 
subtractions that make a large aggregate. Pails of paint 
and boxes of ice cream, pints of whisky and rolls of ribbon, 
may all be a trifle short. During a special investigation 
in 1910 the city sealer in Harrisburg, Pa., could not find 
a single wooden berry box in the city that would hold a 
quart. Prints of butter are often short weight. The 
creamery people say they shrink by the evaporation of the 
water in the butter, but when the New York State Super- 
intendent visited 30 creameries throughout the State 
and weighed 252 prints dripping wet from the molds, he 
found 124 short. Those intended for sale in Massachusetts 
seemed to evaporate least ; that State has stringent laws. 

Tampering with the quahty of goods is only another 
form of the same game. Manufacturers of turpentine 
have found that five gallons of kerosene in a forty-gallon 
barrel of turpentine cannot be detected. Kerosene will 
cost them five cents a gallon and turpentine recently ran 



2o8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

up to eighty-six cents, so that this makes a neat profit. 
But retail dealers and painters probably know the same 
trick and baptize the turpentine further as it passes down 
the line. The commercial value of oleomargarine was 
chiefly that it could be made to look and taste like butter. 
The law got after it, not because it fooled the consumer, but 
because it undersold butter and interfered with the market 
of the farmers and creameries. In this case the hostihty 
of two classes of dealers protected the consumer. Ice 
cream is thickened with starch or gelatine to make it keep 
its shape, and made of skim milk, condensed milk, or no 
milk at all. A new process makes an emulsion of skim 
milk for ice cream that looks like the richest kind of cream. 
That ought to be a great saving to the country. But this 
is a hymn of many verses. We must chant the rest on the 
day of judgment. 

Another mild method of defrauding is to awaken false 
expectations and so lure the buyer on. Fire sales and 
bankrupt stocks are advertised to unload old stuff. At 
mark-down sales the tags are marked up before the old 
price is crossed off. In the dressing of show windows a 
few articles of special value are placed close to the window 
to give respectability to the lot. At bargain sales a few 
high-priced pieces are mixed in. Trading stamps give the 
customer the impression that he is getting something to 
boot, while he pays for it just the same. The lies told in 
advertising are like the sands of the sea which no man can 
number. One of the most wonderful symptoms of the 
moral uplift is the fact that the publicity men of the country 
under the leadership of an unusual kind of Christian have 
undertaken to make advertising tell the truth. 

Any really fraternal action in business dealings comes 
to us with a happy shock of surprise. If a druggist told 
us that some high-priced patent medicine was of no use 
and that we could get the same ingredients for five cents ; 



THE REIGN OF THE MIDDLEMAN 209 

or if a painter advised us that the house does not need 
paint, but a rubdown with soap and water, — would not our 
heart warm to these men as if we had met a friend in a 
foreign land ? 

The low morality of commercial life has even affected 
the language spoken and made words lose their integrity. 
The most honest merchant who calls goods ^^all wool" or 
'^all Hnen" uses these words in a quahfied sense. A New 
York law provides that collars marked ^^pure linen" or 
^^all Knen" must contain at least one thickness or ply of 
pure Hnen. The names used in the fur trade have no rela- 
tion to zoology. Two bunnies that wiggled their noses 
over the same head of cabbage in France turn up in an 
American fur store, the one as an electric seal, the other as 
a Hudson lynx. When even words become so sHppery, 
there must be a good deal of oiliness. 

The selfish nature of business comes out in its ugliest 
form when the goods sold are actually harmful to the buy- 
ers. The Pure Food and Drug Act transformed the labels 
of patent medicines, and the 40 per cent of alcohol or 
5 per cent of opium, about which they had been so dis- 
creetly silent, leered out at last. In the Middle Ages the 
poisoning of rich men was one road to wealth; to-day it 
is the poisoning of the poor; but it must be done on a 
large scale or it doesn't pay. The entire liquor trade is an 
example of a harmful industry maintained by hook or crook 
because it is profitable. The men engaged in it save their 
self-respect by persuading themselves that they too serve 
human welfare, but they all know that the percentage of 
harm inflicted by their business is fearfully great. Yet 
the immense profits in it bear down all considerations of 
humanity. Alcohol is a spirit born of hell, but he is merely 
a satellite and tool of a far greater devil, and that is Mam- 
mon. The Hquor trade is a clear demonstration what 
business conducted for profit will do when it happens to 



2IO CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

get behind a product that is harmful instead of wholesome 
in its nature. 

If commerce existed to satisfy the economic needs of 
the consumers, it would seek to keep pace with their needs. 
Since its guiding purpose is to make profits for the dealer, 
it outruns the actual needs. Speculative commerce is 
always creating a stock which it hopes to sell. A good 
business man discovers new markets; a great business 
man creates new markets by creating new desires. The 
persuasiveness of business may be valuable as well as charm- 
ing. Vacuum cleaners, fireless cookers, and life insurance 
policies would not have gone on their beneficent mission 
so swiftly if the hope of profits and commissions had not 
urged them on. To awaken dormant desires may be a 
supreme social service. Education and religion are tre- 
mendous stimulators of new wants. The teacher and 
preacher are rivals of the drummer in seeking to open new 
markets for their goods. But with them, we hope, the 
dominant motive is to build up nobler lives. Their self- 
interest is bound up with their success, but they get no 
financial commission on the souls they save or the boys 
they attract to college. On the other hand, the motive of 
the drummer is not to help men, but to sell goods and make 
a profit for himself and his firm. A man is a creature to 
whom, with proper skill, we may be able to sell something. 
After he has bought the oil painting for $7.89, or has paid 
the first dollar down on the installment plan, we lose in- 
terest in him. Formerly it was cominon to lubricate the 
path of persuasiveness by alcoholizing prospective buyers. 
There is less of that now, but we still hypnotize them with 
aesthetic surroundings and ^'sympathetic" saleswomen. 

There are large social values in all this and we blame 
no one for any charm of persuasiveness that he may possess 
or use, but the total effect on our national character is 
serious. Christianity and education have combined to 



THE REIGN OF THE MIDDLEMAN 211 

build up in our race some measure of self-restraint by teach- 
ing us to fix our eyes on some larger purpose far ahead, and 
for love of that to refuse gratification to our passing whims. 
The savage, the child, the imbecile, and the criminal 
yield to the lust of the flesh and the eye. The Indian sold 
his pack of furs, the product of a winter's work, to get a 
few gHttering trinkets. Does not business, even in its 
respectable forms, seek to batter down our self-restraint 
and power of inhibition, and reduce us to the same level ? 
The show windows of our shopping districts and all display 
advertising do not simply try to inform our intelHgence, 
but seek to break down our capacity for saying No. The 
present craze for automobiles is not a spontaneous folly 
01 the people. It is carefully worked up by commercial 
interests. The actual cost of manufacturing is said to be 
only a third or fourth of the retail price of a machine ; the 
rest goes into persuasion of eye and ear. The automobile 
is a highly valuable invention, but when men and women 
mortgage their homes, surrender the chances of educating 
their children, or perhaps forego the possibility of having 
children in the coming years, in order to buy an automobile, 
they inflict a spiritual damage on themselves and the 
whole nation which will reach down into coming genera- 
tions. 

All serious observers agree that the generation now grow- 
ing up in our country is lacking in that stern faculty of 
self-restraint which was ground into their fathers and 
mothers by their reHgion and education. The home and 
the school, are held responsible. They are surely to blame 
for not resisting the decline more effectively, but the active 
agent in breaking down the old frugality is profit-making 
business, which surrounds the young with lures and stimu- 
lates their desires. Capitalism is sapping its own founda- 
tions. It got its first start in the Calvinistic countries, 
because Calvinistic religion induced saving and the accu- 



212 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

mulation of reserve capital. All the merry saints' days 
on which people had stopped work and spent money for 
pleasure were cut out of the calendar. Sunday was the 
only rest day left, and all spending and dissipation on that 
day was forbidden. Calvinism taught sobriety of dress 
and made conscientious work a fundamental Christian 
duty. By thus increasing earnings and decreasing ex- 
penditures it helped to create the economic reserves which 
financed the new industry created by the power machine. 
So reHgious frugality laid the foundations for capitaUsm 
and put civilization on its legs financially. Now capital- 
ism is disintegrating that virtue in the descendants of the 
Calvinists and persuading them to buy baubles that capital 
may make profit. 

How deeply our standards of morality are affected by 
commercialism probably no man can estimate. Not only 
the practice, but the theory of honesty is weakened. Single 
Taxers in their educational campaign find it exceedingly 
hard to persuade business men that wealth made out of 
the unearned increment in land values is morally ques- 
tionable at all. ^^A man has a right to a profit on his 
investments.'' Stock gambling is defended by good men. 
To make a profit has so long seemed the essence of business 
that the demand for any other end and aim is greeted with 
a smile as the amiable hobby of an ideaUst. I once put 
this case to a group of young men in a Bible class : Sup- 
pose a furniture dealer had a whitewood bookcase, stained 
cherry, and valued at $io ; a customer shows by his ques- 
tions that he thinks it is genuine cherry-wood ; would the 
dealer be justified in charging him $15 for it? To my 
astonishment the majority of the young men thought that 
was quite right. When I was pastor in New York, I spoke 
to a fine young man about his religious life and urged him 
to join the Church. He replied : ^'I can't become a Chris- 
tian ; I have to lie too much." He explained that he was 



THE REIGN OF THE MmDLEMAN 213 

a salesman and was under instructions to misrepresent 
the goods. I approved of his refusal to live a double life 
and urged him to get out of that job. Some time later 
he came to me with evident satisfaction, said he had found 
another position, and wanted to join the Church. Later 
he told me incidentally that he had secured his former job 
for his brother. 

Business men often defend the shady aspects of com- 
merce, the shoddy goods and the bargain counters, on the. 
ground that the public will have it so. The people tempted 
them and they fell. It is indeed hard to say if the angler 
tempts the fish or the fish the angler. The bargain-hunt- 
ing public has been trained by business and then turns on 
its trainer. It, too, is after profits, and the business man 
can see the spirit of business reduced to a caricature when 
he watches a mob of women at his bargain counter. 

But if dishonesty is forced on business by the public, 
why does business fight for the right to be dishonest? 
The Pure Food and Drug Act was bitterly fought by some 
of the interests concerned. The officials enforcing its 
provisions have been attacked and circumvented. The 
Department of Agriculture and eminent names in it and 
even above it have been embroiled and besmirched. Every 
effort to secure publicity in business Hfe has met with op- 
position. 

Our moral diagnosis of Business has given us fairly clear 
results. The economic wants of society are supplied by 
a system in which the middleman is the controlHng factor. 
The dominant motive is not to supply human needs, but 
to make a profit for those who operate the system. The 
higher motives of human nature are not evoked and edu- 
cated. The selfish motives are stimulated by fear and 
covetousness. Whatever moral goodness there is in busi- 
ness — and there is a great deal of it — comes through the 
fundamental soundness of human nature that insists on 



214 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

being kindly and fraternal; also through the fact that 
the main economic needs are clean and wholesome, ajid 
give moral worth to the work that supplies them. But 
the one law that pervades business, as completely as the 
law of gravitation pervades physics, is the law of profit. 
Profit means success, ease, safety, and opportunity for 
more profit. No profit means death. Therefore profit 
must be made; if possible, by respectable methods; but 
.if the vice or ignorance of the buying public, the nature of 
goods to be marketed, the pressure of competition, or any 
exigencies of the market force profit to part company with 
ethics, then the ruling passion of Business will put the 
personal character of the business man to a test from v/hich 
it does not always emerge undamaged. The manifold 
forms of dishonesty and overreaching that we meet in 
business are the natural result of a relation that is based 
almost wholly on individual selfishness, and hardly at all 
on fraternity or solidarity. 

That selfishness takes new forms when business passes 
from competitive to monopoHstic conditions. A railway 
or a trust no longer clings to the ledges of the economic 
precipice. The monopoly element in their business lends 
security, and security can afford good manners. They 
no longer need to lure their customers because their cus- 
tomers have to come to them anyway. They can assume 
the dignified manner of the Grand Seigneur who despises 
the tricks of the petty tradesman. Just as a great con- 
soKdated industry can afford to plan pension and insurance 
systems for its employees, so it can afford to treat its cus- 
tomers without resorting to adulteration or false measure. 

But while the manners of business may change when it 
reaches the security of a partial or total monopoly, its 
spirit and essential nature do not change in the least. 
More than ever the real end of its existence is profit. A 
small business is glad of small profit; Big Business wants 



THE REIGN OE THE Mn)DLEMAN 21 5 

big profit. Profit is gross income minus expenses. Con- 
sequently it can be increased either by raising the gross 
income or by lowering the expenses. The former may 
mean higher prices; the latter may mean poorer service. 
Both are famihar enough. 

Generally speaking, income depends on rendering valu- 
able service. But if profit can be made best by neglecting 
the needs of the public or even by damaging the life and 
health of the public, then that becomes the policy of busi- 
ness. Stupid corporations have often been so greedy for 
immediate gain that they have allowed their plant and 
rolhng stock to run down, and the good will of the pubHc, 
which is an important spiritual asset, to be turned into ill 
will. Intelligent corporations are ready to improve their 
service, but only so far as the improvement will directly 
or indirectly increase dividends. Under monopoly condi- 
tions improvement stops at the line of maximum profit. A 
railway may be keen to buy an improved type of locomotive 
which economizes fuel, but crowd its patrons in dingy depots 
and ruin their eyes by poorly lighted cars. Street railways 
may be ready to introduce pay-as-you-enter cars, because 
they insure a thorough collection of fares, but allow pas- 
sengers to hang from straps in indecent crowding because 
one car with eighty passengers is cheaper to run than two 
cars with forty each. If improvements are to be made 
which increase the comfort of the public, but decrease the 
dividends of a pubHc service corporation, pubHc opinion 
and the Law have a hard time holding the kicking corpora- 
tion while its tail is being docked. 

Decreasing the expense of service is one way of increas- 
ing profits; charging more for the service rendered is the 
other; the ideal is the maximum price combined with the 
minimum service. The beauty of any business that con- 
tains a monopoly feature is that prices can be raised with 
more safety. In competitive business new capital rushes 



2l6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

in when the price of an article gets too far away from 
its actual cost. A monopoly can charge what the market 
will stand. Of course, even aside from legal restrictions, 
a gas company could not prudently charge $5 per thousand, 
for people would take to kerosene or candles. But there 
is a wide margin between the cost of gas and the price of it. 
For instance, a legislative committee in New York in 1905 
found that the Consolidated Gas Company had supple- 
mented its own supply of gas by buying of other companies. 
The New Amsterdam Gas Company charged the Consoli- 
dated 32 cents per thousand for 3I billion feet; other com- 
panies charged prices ranging from 40 down to 28 cents 
per thousand; presumably they made a profit on the sale 
at that wholesale price. But the Consolidated retailed 
this gas to the consumer at |i. Just at present the valori- 
zation (fine word!) scheme in the Brazilian coffee trade is 
occupying public attention. An international syndicate 
has limited the supply, fixed the prices, prevented them from 
being cut, and raised the price of coffee from j^ cents in 
1906 to 14I cents in 191 2. The novel feature of this busi- 
ness arrangement is that the Brazilian government has 
frankly and openly taken part in the hold-up. The meat 
packers have tried to persuade the pubhc that the high 
prices of meat are due to a growing scarcity of meat, which 
in turn is due to the quantity of corn converted into 
whisky instead of hogs, and the amount of breakfast food 
consumed by a lavish nation. But the Department of 
Commerce and Labor replies that the seven principal 
Western markets received far more Uvestock in the first 
four months of 191 2 than in the same four months of any 
year in the last decade. American beef has not risen in 
price in London as it has in New York. The untrained J 
instinct of the people persists in suspecting some connec- f 
tion between the permanence of high prices and the other 
permanent fact that all the great staples are now sold to us 



THE REIGN OE THE Mn)DLEMAN 217 

by consolidations of business which are able to limit out- 
put and unlimit prices. 

The Pullman Company is an example of business under 
monopoly conditions. It performs a service which the 
various railways ought themselves to perform, but the 
ownership of Pullman stock is so distributed among high 
officials of the railways and so profitable, that the com- 
pany has been able to maintain an approximate monopoly. 
Though the charges are out of all proportion to the service 
performed, there was no motion by the Company to lower 
them until the Interstate Commerce Commission compelled 
lower rates for the upper berths. In consequence the 
profits have been enormous. The company has paid large 
annual dividends on its stock, only a fraction of which 
represents money paid in by stockholders, yet these regu- 
lar dividends left a constantly accumulating surplus. In 
1898 the surplus was divided in an extra cash dividend of 
20 per cent and an extra stock dividend of 50 per cent; the 
latter was worth $45,000,000 at current prices. By 1905 
another surplus of $20,000,000 had accumulated. The 
net earnings of the stockholders increased 50 per cent from 
1900 to 1905; the average wages to its employees increased 
5 per cent; if the service rendered to travelers has improved, 
we should be glad to know it. The company pays its 
porters the pittance of $25 a month, and leaves the rest 
of their wages to be paid by the generosity of the public. 
This is the insolence of the middleman when he has a 
monopoly. 

The Express Companies are an excellent illustration of 
the character developed by the middleman when he be- 
comes a monopoHst. In European countries the railways 
themselves furnish express service at a slight advance over 
their freight rates ; local forwarders attend to the collection 
and delivery. In the United States alone have subsidiary 
carriers grown up as middlemen between the railways and 



2l8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the public to care for the rapid carriage of small parcels. 
The thorough investigation given to the express business 
by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 191 2 has re- 
vealed their rank growth. The time when the stockholders 
ever put any money into the business has dropped out of 
human memory and record; the Commission feels sure 
that the original capital never amounted to more than a 
million dollars, and that the railways could supply the 
necessary plant to carry on the business themselves for a 
million. The competitive outfit of all the thirteen com- 
panies now doing business in the country is only $27,153,869. 
Their real asset consists in the monopoly given them by 
their contracts with the railways. On this slender basis 
they have made profits so enormous that they have blushed 
to distribute them outright, and now have $150,000,000 
on their hands. They have therefore been in a position 
to furnish the public excellent service in return for their 
large profits, if good service follows prosperity at all with 
profit-making monopolies. 

Instead of that, the public has long been in a state of 
indignation and revolt against them. During the investiga- 
tion Commissioner Lane said that ^4f prosecutions were 
brought on every complaint that has been made to the 
Commission, all the express companies would be made 
bankrupt by the fines imposed." The purpose of the ex- 
press service is to furnish rapid carriage; the companies 
have often defeated the purpose of their existence by rout- 
ing packages in circuitous ways in order to give the haul 
to the railways on which they had their favorable contracts. 
The express service exists to carry small parcels; the com- 
panies have put the heaviest rates on the small parcel and 
the common man, and favored the big shippers. They 
have exercised the tyranny of a profit-making monopoly 
by frequent overcharges and collection of charges at both 
ends; by excessive insurance and delay in the settlement 



THE REIGN OF TliE MIDDLEMAlSr 21^ 

of claims; by arbitrarily limiting the free delivery zones; 
by issuing complicated rules and obscure statements which 
left the public helpless; by doing their patrons out of their 
rights through craftily worded contracts on the receipts 
given; and by charging rates which they now confess to 
have been excessive and extortionate. 

Being powerful middlemen between the railways and the 
public they have used their power to exploit both parties. 
In times of emergency they have secured favorable con- 
tracts from the railways by pressure through financial 
interests allied to them, or through the directors of the 
'^railways whom they had corrupted by ownership of their 
profitable stock, so that they have become parasites of the 
railways instead of an arm of the railways. They have 
been insidious competitors of the postal system by attract- 
ing the profitable business to themselves by special rates 
and throwing the unprofitable business on the government. 
They have for all these years stood in the way of a parcels 
post, and have done our people out of untold conveniences 
and pleasures which we should have enjoyed through the 
parcels post system. For fifty years they have staved ofif 
government control. They themselves were unable to 
extricate themselves from the complications and tangles 
in which they had involved themselves, in spite of the fact 
that the express business had become a family affair, 
handled in the main by three groups of interests. 

Here, then, we have the middleman under monopoly 
conditions. The telegraph business is another instance. 
Practically every civiHzed nation has applied public owner- 
ship to the telegraph; we have left it to middlemen. Con- 
sequently our tolls are exorbitant and the service is poor. 
Until the Bell interests secured control of the Western 
Union and introduced telephone deUvery and the night 
letter, there was no notable improvement in the service for 
years. It is claimed that inventions have been bought up 



220 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL Oia)ER 

by the Western Union Company and suppressed, lest the 
service would have to be improved. The Company hires 
little boys to deliver its messages, turning their early years 
into an employment that teaches them nothing for their 
future career, and sending them into saloons and houses 
of prostitution to get their education. If the mails were 
under corporation management, we should presumably 
have child letter carriers. 

Thus the consumer is between the Scylla of competition 
and the Charybdis of monopoly. If he is under competi- 
tion, he is bitten by fraud; if under monopoly, he is devoured 
by extortion. Against fraud and adulteration he may be 
able to protect himself by using his wits and by going to a 
competitor; against the extortion of monopoly the individ- 
ual is helpless. As industrial mechanisms the trusts are far 
superior to a competitive mob of small concerns, but their 
efficiency is so little tempered by morality that the great 
mass of our nation, with the exception of the monopolists 
and the sociahsts, is anxious to get back from the fire of 
monopoly into the cool and refreshing frying-pan of com- 
petition. Yet the era of monopoly has only begun, and our 
masters are wise enough to raise prices slowly. But the 
Lord have mercy on our children! 

Human society teiids to become constantly more inter- 
dependent. It used to be like a colony of moUusks; it 
is becoming like the body of a man. We live by faith in 
one another. We have to trust our health officers to test 
our water supply and the milk brought into the city, for 
we cannot do it. We have to trust our newspapers to 
report the facts correctly to us, or a whole city will be 
misled in its judgment, and will crucify its Christ and elect 
Barabbas mayor. Our business men hold a fiduciary rela- 
tion to the whole community. Through them God answers 
our prayer: ^^Give us this day our daily bread." As a 
class they hold the supreme power in modern society. 



THE REIGN OF THE MHDDLEMAN 221 

Taking business as a whole is the relation of this class to 
the community on a satisfactory moral basis ? 

Ruskin says that five great intellectual professions have 
existed in every civilized nation. ^^The Soldier's profes- 
sion is to defend it; the Pastor's to teach it; the Physician's 
to keep it in health; the Lawyer's to enforce justice in it; 
the Merchant's to provide for it." Like a true Christian, 
Ruskin sees that the roots of honor for every profession lie 
in its capacity of self-sacrifice for the good of all. The 
honor which each profession gets is proportioned to its readi- 
ness to die in the service of the nation. ^^The duty of all 
these men is, on due occasion, to die for it. ' On due occa- 
sion,' namely: the Soldier, rather than leave his post in 
battle; the Physician, rather than leave his post in plague; 
the Pastor, rather than teach falsehood; the Lawyer, 
rather than countenance injustice; the Merchant — what 
is his ' due occasion ' of death ? It is the main question for 
the merchant. For, truly, the man who does not know when 
to die, does not know how to Hve." ^ 

If the relation of the Merchant to the nation is founded 
altogether on selfishness, and has no sacrificial quahties 
in it, he may get money, but he will not get honor and love, 
and the Business which he fashions and rules will remain 
an unchristianized portion of the social order. 

1 Ruskin, "Unto this Last/' Chapter I. 



CHAPTER VII 

UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 

The dominant thing in the Kf e of almost every man is the 
way he gets his Hving. The dominant thing in every social 
order are its economic processes. Modern society is domi- 
nated by the owners and organizers of industry and com- 
merce, by the class of the business men. And the business 
men are dominated by Profit. They are the masters of 
Business but the servants of Profit. Profit is the end and 
motive of their work, the basis of their power, and the 
law of their business life. 

The thoroughness with which Profit dominates the capi- 
talistic system differentiates it from all other forms of 
economic organization. In the handicraft system which 
preceded capitalism, the aim was to fix a price that would 
be fair and reasonable for producer and consumer, and 
to curb any hankering for excess profit. The work of the 
old-fashioned farmer was done for the support of his family 
and with httle commercial profit in sight. All the milhons 
of housewives, who run that important economic organiza- 
tion called the family, are cooking and sewing to keep their 
folks well fed and dressed, and not to make profit out of 
them. When the city or the State undertake economic 
functions, such as road building or the marketing of water, 
they are not after a maximum income ; they are planning 
to satisfy the needs of the citizens. As soon as our postal 
system shows a surplus, plans are made to cut it down by 
lowering the postage or extending the rural delivery system, 
in order to make it still more serviceable. 

222 



■?. ' 



UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 223 

On the other hand, in capitahstic industry and commerce 
the leaders do not focus use and service ; they focus profit. 
If their business is also useful to humanity, so much the 
better ; but first and chiefly it must earn a profit for them- 
selves. In the larger forms of business profit becomes an 
end in itself ; men want profit in order to gain more profit. 
Business can say with Paul : ^'This one thing I do.'' That 
directness and single-mindedness gives capitahstic com- 
mercialism its driving power and efficiency. It wants 
profit, and it goes for it, untroubled by humane considera- 
tions or moral scruples. It gets the best of the State in 
their common deahngs, just as the selfish httle girl takes 
the best apples and leaves the nubbins and cores to her 
conscientious brother. 

If Profit is so much the dominant force in our economic 
life and in. our whole social order, it becomes of the highest 
importance to every religious man, arid especially to every 
teacher and leader, to understand the moral nature of 
Profit. A man might be pardoned for having hazy notions 
about Luther's doctrine of justification by faith, or about 
the Pharisees and Sadducees, but as for Profit — ought he 
not to know the god of this world ? 

^^ Profit" is a shifty word, used in various meanings. 
In a broad, popular way it means what is left to a business 
man after he has paid his expenses. A cripple keeping a 
newstand can talk about his profits in this sense just as 
proudly as a railway company. But this total ^^ profit" 
is hke an onion, having many layers that can be peeled 
away and getting more succulent and odoriferous when 
you get inside. Rent must be deducted; also interest; 
even if the business man is his own landlord and his own 
financial backer. The narrower ^^profit" which then re- 
mains still includes the reward which is due to the business 
man as an active and intelligent worker. If he had to 
employ a man of hke abiUty, with the same devotion to 



224 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

business and the same capacity for hustling, he would have 
to pay a stiff salary. He owes himself this salary, and an 
able business head is so rare and so essential to success 
that no fair judgment will grudge him the liberal estimate 
that he is likely to put on his own abilities. In so far as 
Profit is a high wage for able work, it has moral quality, 
and those who defend the justice of the present economic 
system are apt to put the whole emphasis on this honorable 
element of profit. Averaging their income through their 
life, many business men get nothing more than a comfort- 
able maintenance for their family, such as a salaried man 
also gets, and while the amount appropriated by them 
may not square with absolute justice, there would probably 
be no world-wide social unrest if our social order showed 
no deeper cracks and fissures. 

We can also allow the claim — though not with equal 
confidence — that the profit of the business man ought in 
justice to contain some compensation for the risk he runs. 
Competitive business life might be classed as an extra- 
hazardous occupation which demands high insurance rates. 
At least for infant businesses the rate of mortality is fright- 
ful, and most of them die the violent death of bankruptcy 
sooner or later. A business man has to suffer so many hard 
knocks, and is so exposed to ^Hhe slings and arrows of out- 
rageous fortune," that we shall be glad in Christian gen- 
erosity to allow him an extra slice of profit for his risks, 
provided he will henceforth do the same in calculating the 
wages of his employees, who run the terrible risk of being 
out of work for weeks or months at a time, and especially 
of the miners, sailors, brakemen, lumber-jacks, and mill- 
hands, who incur the risk, not merely of financial loss, 
but of bloody mutilation and stark death, and whose pay 
does not seem to rise with the amount of risk involved. 

But the interest on capital, the reward for ability, and 
the insurance against risk do not yet account for the whole 



UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 22$ 

of profit, at least not for that soft, round profit which some- 
times invites inspection Kke the rotundity of a Httle boy's 
pocket when he comes out of the pantry. Profit is {a + b 
+ c) + X. What is the x? Sometimes the ingredients 
are clearly separable. Old Grimes used to manage his 
business himself and furnished his own capital. To-day 
the business is incorporated and managed by MacGregor, 
a capable Scotchman who gets $3500 a year. Young 
Grimes, who has the intellect of a third-rate clerk, is more 
interested in managing dances, but he is still a heavy 
stockholder in the business. Now, when the banks lend 
money at 5 per cent, why does young Grimes get 12 per cent 
on his stock ! It is the great ambition of MacGregor to 
be admitted to '^a share in the business." He could hardly 
work harder then than he does now. He is presumably 
getting the "wages of abihty and superintendence" now. 
Why, then, would his outlook and financial position be so 
much changed if he were admitted to a share in the profit? 
It seems that an idle and incompetent man may draw 
"profit," and a man who has all the qualities and does all 
the work ascribed to the ideal business man in the books 
may get no "profit." This inside element of "profit" is not 
necessarily connected with work, nor proportioned to the 
value of work done. How, then, is it obtained, and what 
moral basis has it? 

This unearned "profit" is made only in the midst of a 
developed social life. If two pioneer settlers locate in the 
same valley, and one chooses better soil and farms it with 
greater efficiency, his increasing prosperity is not due to 
"profit," but to greater abihty in using the resources of the 
earth and of his own mind and body. Unearned profit is 
made by farming men, and the more men are farmed, the 
vaster is the possibility of profit. It is made up of small 
contributions from many. It arises where production has 
become a social process, and it falls to those who are able 

Q 



226 CHRISTIANIZING THE. SOCIAL ORDER 

to keep back and take for themselves some fractional part 
of what many others produce. ' It is essentially a tribute 
levied by power. In his book on " Great Fortunes '' Professor 
J. W. Jenks points out that the abihty to possess great 
wealth and secure the income from it without active par- 
ticipation in the management of a business is a modern 
condition. He adds: ^^All methods of wealth-getting in 
society can apparently be classified under two heads : first, 
the rendering of service to others or to society for the sake 
of an adequate reward in return ; and second, the acquire- 
ment of gam for one's self at the expense of others with 
practically no service rendered to society." The latter 
method used to be practiced by beggars, thieves, lords, 
courtesans, and princes, but, as Professor Jenks says, it 
is now practiced with success by stockholders. 

In so far as profit is only another name for the fair reward 
which society owes for useful labor and service, it has a 
sound moral basis and we have no quarrel with it. But in 
so far as profit contains an ingredient which is gained with- 
out productive labor, at the expense of others, and without 
their willing consent, it rests on power and not on right, and 
a Christian man is under no obligation whatever to feel moral 
respect for it. On the contrary, it is one of his highest 
Christian duties to aid society in tracing this parasitic trib- 
ute to its sources and preventing its further absorption. 

Such unearned profit may be drawn from various sources, 
singly or in combination. It may be taken by an employer 
from his employees. Not necessarily, however. Where 
free land is accessible in a new country, or where a certain 
kind of labor is scarce, or where an employer is unusually 
just and generous, wages may be so high that the workers 
get practically the full value of their labor in the form of 
wages. But where the labor market is crowded, and where 
the opportunities of labor are in the hands of a limited class, 
the employers are intrenched in a position of power over 



UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 227 

against the workers and can lower wages. Thereby they 

exact an additional amount of labor for the same unit of 

• 

wages, and this additional, unpaid labor is tribute levied 
by power. Under such conditions all employers, tacitly 
and unconsciously, combine in a monopoly of the oppor- 
tunities of labor, for they alone can give a man access to 
that most important of all commodities, a job and a Hving. 
The wages system, which may be fair under conditions of 
equality, becomes extortionate between the strong and 
the weak. For this reason the labor question, which had 
always existed, was intensified in the capitalistic era, when 
the instruments of production passed out of the control of 
the workers more completely than ever before. They 
became relatively weaker; the class of the owners and 
employers became relatively stronger. Thus additional 
profit which is made by employers through this combina- 
tion of weakness and power is unearned profit. It is a trib- 
ute and a tax, levied by those who have no constitutional 
or moral right to tax their fellows. 

Business may also make an unearned profit by unloading 
some of its expenses on the community. For instance, if 
a factory installs cheap furnaces and hires cheap and stupid 
men to stoke them, its expenses are lessened and its profits 
increased. But it vomits its soot into the air, which is a 
precious communistic possession of all, and the community 
pays in discomfort, laundrybills, additional housework, 
and throat diseases what the factory adds to its dividends. 
If the same factory disposes of its chemical waste in the 
most economical way by draining it into the river, it throws 
that part of its legitimate expenses on the public. The 
boys who would swim in the river, the men who would fish 
in it, and the lovers who would get material for a life-long 
romance by it are done out of their right to valuable real 
estate, and have to seek less innocent recreation in more 
costly ways in dance halls, saloons, or moving picture shows. 



2 28 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

If a man is killed in a steel mill and the company settles 
with the widow for $300, she and her children will almost 
certainly be thrown on the neighbors, the charitable or- 
ganizations, or the town for some form of help and support.^ 
If men are paid wages which suffice to maintain them only 
during their working years, the community will have to 
support them when they are old. If a department store 
pays a girl $6 and expects her family to furnish the balance 
of her support, it makes its "profit" at the expense of her 
father and brothers. If it keeps its saleswomen standing 
for long hours, and makes no allowance for the physical 
needs of women, it keeps down the cost of labor, but the 
husbands and children of ailing women in years to come may 
pay for the unearned profit a hundred-fold. 

Business can get something for nothing, but Society can- 
not. If Business fails to pay its bills, somebody else farther 
down the line will have to settle up. What is ^ ^ easy money " 
for one man is bound to be hard loss to another, or to hun- 
dreds of others. Every get-rich-quick concern is balanced 
by thousands of get-poor-quick people who are still stupid 
enough to trust their fellow-men. 

The unearned profit which is thus made at the expense 
of the community is also a form of tribute levied by power. 
The business men are by far the most powerful group in 
every industrial community. To grant them favors is 
political wisdom ; to anger them is political death. If they 
were not so powerfjul, the community would never permit 
the liberties they take. Wherever the people get real 
control of their own government they always register it 
by compelhng business to take care of its material and 
human waste as part of the running expense of business. 

1 The New York Association for Labor Legislation states that in 114 cases 
of married men killed in Erie County, N.Y., the dependents in 38 cases re- 
ceived nothing, in 9 cases received less than $100, and in 34 cases received 
between $100 and $500. 



UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 229 

Business supports the undemocratic control of the boss 
system in politics in order to keep or get these favors at the 
expense of the community. 

Private ownership of the natural resources of the earth 
also confers power to levy tribute. Those who own coal 
and iron mines, oil wells, gas wells, asphalt, or nitrate beds 
hold what industrial society needs, and needs ever more 
urgently. They justly expect a reward for their labor and 
intelligence in making these natural resources available 
for society; but they charge an additional price, not by 
reason of their service, but by reason of their power to com- 
•pel the rest to pay it. The entire supply of anthracite coal, 
for instance, is in the hands of a few corporations who act 
as a unit over against the public ; consequently the price 
of coal is not measured by the cost of mining and hauling 
it, but by ^'what the market will stand." 

Where population is growing and men crowd one another 
for a chance to breathe and labor, the mere ownership of 
space gives power to levy tribute. If one man owned the 
land on which New York is built, plainly all the people 
who live and work there would be at his mercy, and they 
would have to pay for his mercy. If ten people owned the 
land, the case would be only sHghtly changed. At present 
less than 800,000 people own the land on which almost 
5,000,000 live, and 1000 people own the larger proportion 
of the land values of New York. These landlords have 
never come together to agree on the tribute they will levy 
on the 4,000,000 landless land animals who creep and crawl 
on their dominions, but by the silent play of social forces 
they know how much their tenants are willing to pay rather 
than give up any more of the precious margin of time they 
can spend with their famihes, and this they exact. Political 
economists distinguish between rent and profit. In so far 
as both are based on monopoly they are alike. Both are 
tribute levied by power. 



230 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Ours is an age of social consolidation. California throws 
oranges at Massachusetts, and Gloucester tosses back cod- 
fish balls to Los Angeles. The very Ufe of society is de- 
pendent on its channels of transportation and travel, as 
surely as my Hfe depends on my heart and arteries. We 
transport men along steel rails, gas along underground 
tubes, electric dots and dashes along wires strung in the 
air. If, now, we have put these arteries of communication 
into the hands of those who love us not, but who love 
gain, we have put ourselves at their mercy and must pay 
their price. And so we do. For gas that costs fifty cents 
we pay a dollar. For a telegram that costs an Enghshman 
sixpence we pay forty cents. The Lords of Transporta- 
tion exact their tribute. 

Way back in 1892 the New York Tribune^ being a chief 
exponent of the doctrine of protection and chafing under 
the charge that the protective tariff was the cause of the 
swollen fortunes, compiled a Hst of 4047 milHonaires in 
order to prove that the great fortunes were due to other 
causes.^ There is a curious absence of the higher intel- 
lectual activities in this Hst of men to whom our social 
order has given its largest material rewards. Poets, artists, 
scientists, and professors apparently had not served their 
fellow-men sufficiently well to deserve a million. We hear 
of thirty who pubhshed newspapers and story papers, of 
twenty-five who pubhshed copyright books, and of two 
who pubhshed copyright music; may some gentle author 
or musician be hiding in these figures ! On the other hand, 
468 became millionaires by the advance of real estate 
values; 981 by the ownership of natural resources, such as 
mines, forests, plantations, together with the rise of real 
estate values; 386 by- natural monopolies in the distribu- 
tive industries, such as railways, express companies, tele- 

^ Professor John R. Commons has analyzed the table in his "Distribution 
of Wealth," Chapter V. 



UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 23I 

graphs, telephones, and gas ; 303 by banking and the con- 
trol of money; 65 by combining banking, real estate, and 
securities with the practice of the law ; and one by making 
the same happy combination with the practice of medicine. 
One ^^made his'n'' through the Tweed Ring; none ap-^ 
parently by preaching the Gospel. 2 141 had engaged in 
some kind of competitive industry, but aided by monop- 
oKes or combined with real estate investments and securi- 
ties; only 354 were reported to have made their money 
in purely competitive business, and of these some had at 
least enjoyed tariff protection and railway rebates. 

This newspaper compilation was made in defense of pro- 
tection and not in arraignment of monopoly, but it proves 
clearly that great wealth is accumulated, not by pre- 
eminent service, but by the power to levy tribute through 
monopoly control. The more closely and intelHgently 
these fortunes would be analyzed, the more monopoly 
factors would be disclosed. The results would be still 
more striking if the millionaires were not simply counted, 
the big and the Httle alike, but weighed according to the 
quantity of their millions. 

Since 1892 the number of our millionaires, the average 
size of their fortunes, and the proportion which the aggre- 
gate of their property bears to the total wealth of the 
nation have all increased enormously.^ Necessarily so; 
for the more completely the natural resources of the coun- 
try are occupied and consolidated, and the larger the popu- 
lation is which needs them, the greater is the opportunity 
to collect tribute. Industries that formerly seemed purely 
competitive have been able to create durable trusts and 
to control prices by bracing themselves against genuine 

1 In 1855 the New York Sun published a list of the "rich men " in New York 
City. Men began to be "rich" at that time when they had $100,000. The 
Sim^s list contains only 28 millionaires. Yet there were very able men doing 
business in New York in 1855. 



232 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

monopolies. The United States Steel Corporation, for in- 
stance, gets its power largely through its immense mineral 
holdings, its patent rights, and its control of essential trans- 
portation lines, all of which are monopolies. Banking, 
too, is approaching monopoly conditions, and a small 
group of bankers can so give or withhold credit that in- 
dustrial trusts are protected from serious competition and 
given the security of monopoly. 

Monopoly charges are fundamentally like taxes. Gov- 
ernment collects taxes from every man according to his 
ability to pay. A monopoly Kkewise charges what the 
market can stand. In each case a superior power levies 
tribute by compulsion. The State professes to do it for 
the common good, and in a well-governed community the 
people get back all they pay in the form of taxes. In fact, 
our taxes buy more for us than any other money we spend. 
If the money levied by public taxation is appropriated by 
private persons or organizations, we call it corruption, and 
all our democratic system of government is largely a device 
to keep a jealous eye and a firm grip on those who spend 
our taxes for us. On the other hand, the taxation by mo- 
nopoly in its hundred forms is not for the public good, but 
for private enrichment, and the people who are taxed have 
no control over the tax rate levied on them and over the 
money collected from them. It is taxation without repre- 
sentation. 

The chief danger of this form of spoliation is its subtlety. 
It is the most ingratiating and disarming form of theft ever 
invented. If a man held us up at night and collected a 
dollar from us, we should clamor to all the world that we 
had been robbed. When we fill our coal bin for the winter, 
we are being held up for many times that amount, but the 
robbery is connected with so much useful service, it is 
done so peaceably, and the coal dealer who collects the tax 
from us is so innocent of guilt, that we are in doubt where 



UNDER THE LAW OF PROFIT 233 

our thanks should end and our profanity should begin. 
Even to those whose fortunes are swollen with monopoly 
profits the real moral character of their extortion is so dis- 
guised by the genuine social service they have rendered that 
they feel proud of their benefactions to humanity, and 
pained and wronged when an ungrateful world turns against 
them. 

Yet the collection of monopoly profit is immoral, and 
that's all there is about it. To charge another man more 
than a thing is worth is unfair. To take advantage of his 
need to coerce something extra from him is yellow. Even 
to our muddled judgment it becomes morally intolerable 
when practiced between friends, or under circumstances 
where man gets close to man. When Jacob made his 
tired and hungry brother Esau sell his birthright to get 
some of the pottage that stood steaming and savory before 
him, he charged what the market could bear, but he did a 
shabby thing. It is not to the credit of those who have 
taught us christian conduct that our judgment still fumbles 
about the moral nature of unearned profit. If our social 
order is to be christianized, wealth by extortion must cease ; 
work and service must become the sole title to income. 
But if our economic order is not christianized but goes on 
developing on its present basis, then we must bend our 
head to the winter storm that is upon us. In that case 
there is nothing ahead for us but a swift increase of un- 
earned fortunes, and a corresponding swift increase in the 
price of all the joys and necessaries of Ufe. Some men will 
have power to levy tribute; the rest of us must pay it. 
We shall pay it in the excess of work exacted from us in 
return for the right to food and shelter. We shall pay it 
in the sin and misery thrown back on us by those who 
create it. We shall pay it in the food we give to our 
children with stinting hand, and in the price of the little 
blanket on the baby's crib. 



234 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

In one of the sublimest of the Psalms the poet describes 
the all-pervading presence of Jehovah which envelops 
him with awe and follows him with its comfort wherever 
he goes. Woe to the generations yet unborn if, instead of 
the searching but loving presence of the Almighty, they 
shall find themselves beset behind and before by another 
Power, equally pervasive, invisible, and intangible, but 
selfish, merciless, and insatiable ! Then the great psalm 
would be pitched in another key : — 

Whither shall I go from thy hunger, 

Or whither shall I flee from thy greed ? 

If I ascend to the mountain forests, thou art there. 

If I swing my pick in the mines^ thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And emigrate to the uttermost coasts of the sea, 

Even there shall thy hand seize me, 

And thy right hand shall drain me. 



PART IV 

THE INVASION OF GOD'S COUNTRY 

CHAPTER I 

THE MORAL VALUES OF CAPITALISM 

Capitalism is the most efficient system for the creation 
of material wealth which the world has ever seen. Wher- 
ever it invades an old civilization, the ancient organiza- 
tion of production is doomed and goes down before it. This 
technical efficiency proves that the system must have power- 
ful moral forces and cohesions in it. 

It has put humanity under the law of work as never 
before. The pace of work has speeded up in all the indus- 
trial nations. Its dire compulsion has overcome the primi- 
tive laziness and intermittent working habits of undeveloped 
men, and forced their latent resources of physical and 
mental energy into use. It has done for society what 
parental compulsion or hunger has done for countless boys 
who knew how to work when they wanted to, but usually 
preferred to go fishing or ^^hang out with the other fellows." 

Capitalism has taught society the laws and habits of 
association on a large scale. We have seen newly arrived 
Chinamen shuffling along in Indian file as the narrow 
streets of their own country had taught them. We have 
also seen regiments of drilled men in parade sweeping down 
a street, keeping stej) to the boom-boom of the big drum. 
Which shows the higher morality ? Association is the re- 
sult of ethical cohesion, and it is the creator of loyalties 

235 



236 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

and human affections. Many factories even now have a 
fine spirit of fellowship in them. The development of the 
factory is a necessary stage in the evolution of any co- 
operative system which the future may have in store. 
Some of the harsh and despotic elements of capitalistic 
organization were doubtless historically justified as peda- 
gogic necessities. If men were wise, they would combine 
freely; being stupid as well as selfish, they need to have 
the beauties of cooperation knocked into their reluctant 
heads. 

In the leaders of commerce and industry the power 
which they wield under the capitaHstic system evokes the 
same moral qualities which we admire in the great cap- 
tains and kings of history, the rough directness of aim, the 
imperious command of social forces by a single will, the 
self-confidence and driving power of men who are accus- 
tomed to make decisions and be obeyed. It begets the 
daring venturesomeness which the old pioneers and ex- 
plorers had. It demands a wonderful concentration of 
will and intellect, a perpetual forward reach of the mind. 
They learn to take the pounding of adversity with cool 
fortitude, and to rig the last shred of sail to the stump of 
the mast when all the rigging has gone overboard. 

On the other hand, the defenders of capitalism often 
inflate its stock. They assume that the whole spiritual 
and material advance of modern civilization is due to the 
capitaHstic system, just as the Roman Catholic Church 
sets all the moral progress made by Western humanity in 
fifteen hundred years to its own credit. The increase in 
moral and intellectual force during the nineteenth century 
was largely due to the spread of democracy and education. 
The material triumphs of our era are due to the rise of 
science. Applied science would hav^ served any social 
order that might have been in existence during the last 
century. If sociaHsm succeeds capitaKsm, it will probably 



THE MORAL VALUES OF CAPITALISM 237 

make even larger use of science than the short-sighted haste 
of economic individuaHsm has been able to do. Capitalism 
can claim as its virtue and achievement only what its 
pecuUar organization and spirit alone were adapted to ac- 
compHsh. It has served civiHzation best in two directions : 
in developing the appUcation of machine power to produc- 
tion, and in furthering the organization of associated groups 
of workers on a large scale. Profit could best be made by- 
power machines and by gang work ; consequently capital- 
ism developed both. At these points it was in line with 
human progress and boosted it. It entered into a working 
partnership with science in so far as science could build 
machinery, develop the exactness of operation necessary for 
machine work, analyze and combine material, and in general 
aid production and the creation of profit. For all aid it 
gave science in this way it deserves our gratitude. 

We have taken the hopeful position that our entire 
social order, with all its terrible immoraHties, is neverthe- 
less woven through wdth Christian elements, which form the 
basis of its further regeneration. The same thing is true 
of our economic order. With all their bitter cruelty and 
wrong our factories are the cells out of which a christianized 
industry must be evolved. Even now business men are 
public servants in embryo. They pride themselves on the 
community service they are rendering, and many a one of 
them would serve admirably as Bishop of the Church of 
Holy Industry, if he had half a chance to put his Chris- 
tian good will into actton. 

But the great powers of human goodness that lie latent 
in our economic Hfe are largely kept down or misdirected 
through the constitutional maladjustment of social forces 
in capitaHsm. The power of association is thwarted or 
soured by the competitive struggle and the autocratic rela- 
tion into which the leaders are placed over against the 
workers. The profit system lures the economic stewards 



238 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of society into tricking or extorting from those whom they 
ought to serve. Our economic system in its fundamental 
structure is still nonmoral or immoral, nonchristian or 
unchristian. It offends the thoughtless by its excesses, 
and the thoughtful by its essence and spirit. The more 
the Christian spirit rises to clear-sighted ascendency in any 
individual or any social group, the more offensive and in- 
tolerable does the ethic of capitaHsm seem. 

We must remember in favor of our economic life that it 
embodies the material interests, which are naturally least 
touched by spiritual considerations. Church and school 
deal with the soul and the intellect, and so call out the 
higher motives and relations. The home can lean on the 
powerful instincts of sexual and parental love in holding 
its members together in helpful relations. The home was 
relieved of its former despotic and exploiting elements 
partly by unloading its economic work on the factory. On. 
the other hand, industry and commerce deal with that part 
of Hfe in which the selfish and animal nature is most 
interested. Therefore they have lagged behind the other 
portions of social life in coming under the higher law of 
fraternity and service. 

But it would be fatal to the evolutionary redemption of 
mankind if we abandoned the great economic domain to 
the brute laws and tried to live as Christians in our other 
relations. Neither the individual nor society can live a 
double life with impunity. To our whole modern world 
Christ says: ^^Ye cannot serve two masters. If ye hold 
to Mammon, ye will learn to despise God." Society is not 
divided into water-tight bulkheads. The influences flow 
back and forth incessantly. 

On the one hand, the Christian sections of our social 
organism are sending wholesome human impulses into rela- 
tions that would otherwise be purely cannibalistic. The 
good-fellowship with which even competitors often stand 



THE MORAL VALUES OF CAPITALISM 239 

by one another ; the democracy and human kindness with 
which some employers and employees regard each other; 
the genuine courtesy and helpfulness which business men 
show to their customers ; the pubKc spirit with which great 
business concerns are taking hold of the new social service 
measures — are quaHties bred and educated in the chris- 
tianized hfe of the Home, the School, the Church, and the 
Neighborhood. Business has banked on the moral re- 
sources, the honesty and trustworthiness, created by agencies 
outside of business Ufe. The personal virtues of business 
men have pulled Business through and made it tolerable 
and respectable. 

The democratic State too has supplied Christian virtues 
to Business. Usually the State in each case began by let- 
ting Capitalism run according to its own laws, but the 
thing became intolerable, and the State had to pull its 
teeth and shorten its chain. The State had to step in 
with its superior Christian ethics and put certain limits to 
the immoralities of Capitalism. If it had not done so, 
CapitaUsm would have mutilated and killed the men, 
brutalized the women, and drained the children so fast 
that the human material of civilization would have been 
rotten in the second generation and the social order would 
have collapsed.^ It would have devastated its own feeding 
ground and killed itself, or, to put it in theological ter- 
minology, it would have gone to the devil. The State, in 
the interests of morality, has so emasculated and domesti- 
cated Capitalism that there is hardly a specimen of the 
untamed variety at large. Foreign observers think we 
have the nearest approach to the genuine beast in America. 

So the redeemed portions of the social order have in- 
fluenced Business for good. But the influence runs the 
other way, too. Business is a great institution which incul- 

1 See the story of early English capitalism in F. Engels, "The Condition 
of the Working Classes in England in 1844." 



240 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

cates its own laws and spirit, until they get into the blood 
of men. All the other institutions of society are affected 
by the mere existence of this powerful assimilating force 
alongside of them. In addition to that, Business has an 
expansive power in it which, compels it to reach out and 
rule. Like Christianity, it is a missionary force. It is 
impatient of any moral restraint that hampers it in making 
profit. The Slave Power of the South was a great business 
system, and it was not content with being safe from inter- 
ference in the slave States, but enforced the active coopera- 
tion of the free States, and demanded the right of expanding 
into the new territory of the West. The liquor interests 
are simply a big section of the capitalistic interests of the 
country. Like all other business, the liquor business needs 
an expanding market for its products. When it collides 
with the moral determination of our people to put a stop 
to its ravages, it fights. It fights to keep possession of the 
wet cities and country districts, and it actively invades the 
dry districts. Sovereign States find their laws nullified by 
the shipments of liquor from adjoining States, by the aid 
given to blind tigers and boot leggers, by systematic busi- 
ness campaigns to keep the desire for liquor active in dry 
districts, and by corrupt interference by outside parties in 
local political fights. This is not simply an illustration, 
but ar important sample of the way in which Business in 
its necessary pursuit of Profit will break down any barriers 
of law or morals that fence it from its pasture grounds. 

We shall not understand the problem of christianizing 
the Social Order properly as long as we regard unchris- 
tianized Business as a passive object to be molded into 
finer and nobler lines under our hands. It is alive, vibrant, 
strong, assertive, impatient, and full of fight. It will maul, 
ride down, and trample any force that interferes with its 
profits. It has tried to thrust out of position and income 
every public man who has really hurt it, and in many 



THE MORAL VALUES OF CAPITALISM 24 1 

cases it has succeeded. It will misrepresent and slander, 
and if necessary imprison and kill. The conflict between 
the Christian and the unchristian forces in our social order 
is a real war, a conflict of principalities and powers in high 
places. If any one has lost faith in the existence of the 
Devil, of the personal power of maHcious evil, he can regain 
his faith by tackling Big Business hard enough to make it 
mad. The moral nature of our economic system stands 
out clearly only when we see the way it deals with the 
higher ethical values of society. We must test it by the 
way it treats what is holy. In the following chapters we 
shall see how Mammon invades God's country. 



CHAPTER II 

PROFIT VERSUS LIFE 

^^Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for 
his Ufe/' was the judgment of the greatest of all experts 
on human nature.^ A man who would save his money 
from a burning house and let his child perish would be 
regarded with horror. Whenever human Hfe is at stake 
in some striking, dramatic way, as in the Titanic disaster, 
our calloused dullness gives way, the awe of human Ufe 
wakes up in us, and a nation holds its breath to know if 
life has triumphed. If a man's property is injured, the 
Law lets him sue for redress ; if a human life is lost, the 
State itself with its solemn powers takes up the case. 
Reverence for human life as such is one of the best 
products of Christian civilization. The teachings of the 
Church on the eternal destiny of the soul increased the 
valuation of life. A passionate tenderness for life was one 
of the marks of Jesus. His care for ^^the least" and ^^the 
lost" was an expression of love for human Hfe even in its 
stunted and wrecked remnants. 

There is a genuine love for human life in modern society. 
But alongside of great sympathy for single cases of suffer- 
ing runs an astounding indifference to suffering and death 
in the mass. We strain out the gnat of football accidents 
and swallow the camel of Pittsburgh steel industries with- 
out winking. More than 15,000 persons are annually 
killed in American work accidents, and some 500,000 are 
injured. Industry is like a guillotine dropping minute by 

1 Job ii. 4. 
242 



PROFIT VERSUS LIFE 243 

minute, year in and year out, on some part of a human 
body. ^'The total number of casualties suffered by our 
industrial army is sufficient to carry on perpetually two 
such wars at the same time as our Civil War and the 
Russo-Japanese War.'' ^ To the accidents we must add 
the unknown total of sickness and death through occu- 
pational diseases, such as the poisoning by chemical fumes, 
or the lung diseases induced through breathing metal dust 
or cotton fluff. 

Now, some accidents are inevitable when men go dig- 
ging in the bowels of the rocks or turn iron into a blazing 
torrent, but a large proportion of the suffering infhcted by 
industry to-day is entirely preventable. ^^In 1909 few 
competent authorities dared to assert that more than 50 
per cent of the industrial accidents were preventable. To- 
day we do not hesitate to say that from 75 per cent to 90 
per cent are preventable." ^ They have not been pre- 
vented because we are all stupid and busy, and because 
our economic system is not interested in Life, but in Profit. 

The two-class system of Capitalism has taken nearly all 
initiative and authority away from the body of the workers 
and has reduced them to a mute and passive condition.^ 
It has put their comfort and safety at the mercy of the 
owning and managing class who do not share their dangers 
in the mines and shops, and many of whom are ignorant of 

^ See the valuable facts and quotations appended to the report of the Com- 
mittee on Standards of Life and Labor presented at the National Conference 
of Charities and Corrections, 191 2. Section III deals with Safety and 
Health. ^ Accident Bulletin, No. 3, Minnesota. 

^ Collier^ s for Jan. 15, 1910, quotes the following from former Senator 
Colby of New Jersey : " A girl working in a certain factory was warned that 
her machine was defective and that she would lose an arm unless the defect 
was made right. She plucked up courage to speak to the proprietor about 
it, but he roughly informed her that she was not employed to tell him how 
to run his business. She lost her arm and sued for damages. The defense 
was * contributory negligence,' which the employer proved by the fact that 
the girl had known of the defect and had continued working at her own risk." 



244 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



1 



the conditions under which their money is made. If the 
sons and daughters of the owners had to work with the 
employees, accidents would be rarer. The autocracy pre- 
vailing in industry by itself accounts for the neglect of 
safety. Every advance of industrial democracy will help 
to establish health and safety in the workshops. 

In addition to that, the class in control has no direct 
financial interest in the safety of the workers. If a ma- 
chine breaks down, the owners must buy another ; there- 
fore the machines are kept oiled and burnished. If a man 
sickens through carbon-monoxide fumes or the heat of the 
blast furnaces, a new man steps in and it costs the owners 
nothing. A slave was cared for in sickness, because it 
would cost $600 to $1200 to replace him ; free laborers are 
replaced gratis. The miners say if a mule is killed in the 
mines, the superintendent wants to know how it happened ; 
if a man is killed, they take him out of a side door. 

Worse yet : in many ways the safety of the one class can 
be increased only by decreasing the income of the other 
class, and therewith Profit is pitted against Life. It costs 
money to install hoods and blowers to suck up the dust 
while grinding metals. It would cut down profit to sub- 
stitute adult workers for the child workers. Thirty-one 
and four tenths per cent of the girls under sixteen employed 
in the silk weaving industry of Pennsylvania cost their 
employers less than $2 a week. The capital invested in an 
industrial plant will return the maximum of profit if the 
machinery is in operation for the maximum of time and at 
the maximum speed. But the longer the work day, the 
more exhaustion and accidents; likewise the faster the 
speed, the more exhaustion and accidents. The interest 
of the owners to that extent is against the safety and health 
of the workers. This is a dangerous condition to set up 
and institutionalize. Human kindness is not vigorous and 
durable enough to offset such a strain. 



PROFIT VERSUS LIFE 245 

Thus Capitalism, by putting the workers under the con- 
trol of another class whose interests are not identical with 
theirs, is directly responsible for a part of the large ratio 
of industrial accidents and diseases. This indifference to 
the life of the workers was clearest during the youth of 
Capitalism, before the State interfered with its workings. 
In its infancy it impoverished and degraded great strata 
of the population of England. It devastated the people 
in the colonies. ^^We have grown rich because whole 
races and tribes have died for us and continents have been 
depopulated for us." ^ The Congo and Peruvian rubber 
trade are an aftermath of this. State interference has 
lessened the murderous effects of the system, but every 
step of interference was resisted by the financial interests 
affected by it. The railways, for instance, opposed the 
federal legislation which compelled them to introduce 
automatic couplers, though hand couplers decimated the 
trainmen. Even after the law was passed, some of the 
roads delayed the installation as long as possible. The 
manufacturing interests have never been friendly to fac- 
tory inspection. This attitude is more damning than mere 
indifference, which might be due to ignorance. 

Industrial accidents have multiplied with the spread of 
power machinery. Power hammers and lathes have a very 
different way of inflicting injury than the old hammer and 
chisel of the carpenter. Capitalism has shown the most 
wonderful resourcefulness in mastering all the problems of 
the machine in so far as it could multiply and economize 
production and increase profits, but it has been backward 
and even obstinate about adapting machinery to protect 
the safety of the workers. The same situation has been 
duplicated in the industrial communities in general. The 
interests of the powerful class that lives on profits are not 
identical with the class that lives on wages ; therefore our 

^ Professor Sombart, "Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus," I, 325. 



246 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

industrial cities are clean and beautiful at one end and dirty 
and joyless at the other. The hard and loveless spirit of 
industrial life spreads to the whole community and tends 
to brutalize us all. 

Industrial accidents represent only one way in which 
Profit is the enemy of Life. Business sells us death be- 
cause it is profitable. I have before m^e a list of proprie- 
tary medicines condemned by the United States govern- 
ment because they contain habit-forming drugs, such as 
cocain, chloroform, and morphine. Some of them are 
especially intended for little children and are sold as '^Chil- 
dren's Comfort/' '^Kopp's Baby's Friend/' '^Mrs. Win- 
slow's Soothing Sirup." On the firmness of rubber hose 
may depend the lives of women and children at a tenement 
fire, but a test of thirty- two samples of the rubber lining of 
hose showed only one to be of high grade.^ After the 
burning of the steamer General Slocum it was found that 
life preservers were sometimes stuffed with rotten cork or 
sawdust. The lack of life boats on the Titanic was part 
of the general economy of business management. Two 
years ago the President of the International Seamen's 
Union of America said: ^^ There is not sailing to-day on 
any ocean any passenger vessel carrying the number of 
boats needed to take care of the passengers and crew, nor 
a sufficient number of skilled men to handle those boats 
which are carried. If there were, the seamen's condition 
would be much better than it is now." ^ When Business 
adulterates the food of the working people, it lowers their 
physical efficiency on which they must depend to earn 
their living, to strike the pace of work required, and to 
resist disease. Money made by such adulteration is made 
at the expense of fife. The artificial raising of food prices 
to increase profit has the same effect. If the cold-storage 

1 Report of a committee at the convention of the National Fire Protec- 
tive Association, 191 1. 2 Quoted in the Survey, April 27, 191 2. 



PROFIT VERSUS LITE 247 

system were in the hands of a community planning wisely 
for its own welfare, it might make good food cheap all the 
year. In the hands of profit-making commerce it has to 
some extent been turned into a means of counteracting 
the prodigality of God and the summer, and of making 
food dear all the year. The consideration of Profit may so 
distort the natural point of view that a large crop is re- 
garded as a disaster. Business bends all its energies to 
keep up prices and to keep down wages, for either increases 
profits. Therefore Business, as now constituted, has a 
constitutional and inevitable interest in raising the value 
of Things and keeping down the value of Men. That 
makes property an enemy of Life instead of its support. 

Whenever Life is set above Profit in business there is a 
thrill of admiration which indicates that something unusual 
has been done. In 191 1 the Diamond Match Company 
allowed its competitors the use of sesquisulphide, on which 
it holds a patent, in order to put a stop to the terrible 
phosphorus poisoning among the workers in the match 
industry. It thereby set the health of the workers above 
its monopoly profit, and all the country stopped to cheer 
the action. Doubtless it deserved applause. But what 
shall we say of the general morality of business when it is 
reckoned an heroic virtue to set the Hfe of men above an 
additional fraction of one per cent? It is the surest sign 
of moral inferiority when ordinary honesty and decency in 
a given class are praised as noble. We have to add that 
only two of the competitors accepted the offer because 
phosphorus was slightly cheaper than the harmless sub- 
stitute, and Congress in 191 2 had to force the whole in- 
dustry by law to abandon the use of phosphorus. 

The economic organization of a civilized nation ought to 
be able to keep the people in a state of physical efficiency. 
In fact, that would be the minimum that ought to be re- 
quired of it. The real test of the national system would lie 



248 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

in the speed and thoroughness with which it would raise 
the mass of the people to real intellectual culture, to artis- 
tic taste, and to refinement of manners. Mere living is 
not yet Life. The economic organization of our nation 
does not meet even that minimum requirement. In spite 
of the wealth of our natural resources and the comparative ' 
sparseness of our population, several millions of workers 
have not enough income to keep themselves at normal 
physical efficiency.^ As to real culture and refinement, the 
effect of capitalistic industrialism is largely the other way. 
The peasants from southern Europe lose their cheerfulness, 
their songs, their art, their courtesy, in the somber pres- 
sure of our industrial towns. When they are industrialized 
in their native homes, the result is the same. 

The real joy of Life is in its play. Play is anything we 
do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, 
compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real living of life 
with the feeling of freedom and self-expression. Play is 
the business of childhood, and its continuation in later 
years is the prolongation of youth. Real civilization should 
increase the margin of time given to play. The advance 
in science and organization has so increased our power of 
production that even now it would be possible to supply 
the average needs of all by four or five hours of daily work 
by all, and the rest of the day might go to athletics, garden- 
ing, handicraft, visiting, music, study, or any other form 
of play. Instead of that a ten and twelve hour working 
day is frequent, even in exhausting industries, and an eight- 
hour day is the ideal of organized Labor. The long hours 
and the high speed and pressure of industry use up the vi- 
tality of all .except the most capable. An exhausted body ' 
craves rest, change, and stimulus, but it responds only to 

^ See Report of Committee on Standards of Living and Labor, National 
Conference of Charities and Corrections. Nearing, "Wages in the United 
States," Hunter, "Poverty." 



PROFIT VERSUS LIFE 249 

strong and coarse stimulation. In all mill towns where 
the long work day is the rule, the night school, library, and 
church languish, and the saloon and house of prostitution 
flourish. Drink and sexual vice are the ready pillows of 
an exhausted body, the only form of play which degrada- 
tion knows. Unrestrained capitalism would kill out play 
and put even childhood in the yoke. But the killing of 
play means taking the Hfe out of Life. 

The specific gravity of the human body is almost the 
same as that of water. With proper breathing and motion 
a man can move about in the water with ease and delight. 
But he has only a narrow margin of freedom, and a few 
pounds' weight would make his swimming a terrible struggle 
against strangulation, and in time convert his playground 
into a death trap. The same is true of our life and work. 
We have a margin of freedom where the soul can rise and 
feel the joy and beauty of living, but there is a limit where 
fatigue begins, and where work becomes a strain and grind. 
Jane Addams has suggested that our insane asylums ought 
to investigate ^^how many patients become insane because 
of black terror lest they lose their work, how many through 
malnutrition when they have lost it, and how many be- 
cause of the sheer monotony of their employment.'' For 
every person who loses his reason through brooding fear or 
impoverishment of the blood, there are scores who suffer 
some permanent impairment of their spiritual vitality, and 
hundreds who lose the bloom of their merriment and enter 
a somber world of anxiety. They may live till they are 
old, but some of their life has been taken from them, and 
their children are '^born to hoarded weariness as some to 
hoarded gold." Merely to look at the life of the poor from 
a window in the House of Plenty darkens the days. ^^Then 
I returned and saw all the oppressions that are done under 
the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed 
and they had no comforter ; on the side of their oppres- 



250 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

sors there was power, but they had no comforter. Where- 
fore I praised the dead that have been long dead more than 
the living that are yet alive; yea, better than them both 
did I esteem him that hath not yet been, who hath not 
seen the evil work that is done under the sun/' ^ 

A free soul has reservoirs of life within. If we labor for 
our children, for our country, or for a cause we love, spiritual 
forces rise within us and give us a superhuman endurance. 
But when we are drained by compulsion, it is enslavement 
and strangulation of the soul. This is the condition in 
which thoughtful workingmen feel they are placed. They 
believe that they produce enough to give them a margin 
of leisure for real life, but one extra hour of toil, one dollar 
taken from their wage, a Kttle additional speeding of the 
work, wipes out that margin of time and vitaKty which 
makes their life free and livable. That margin is God's 
country in their life, the soil where all the higher instincts 
and desires are cultivated. Wipe that out and you leave 
the brute needs. Their resentment is deepened by the 
knowledge that the extra strength taken from them is 
often turned to useless luxury by those who take it. An 
additional vase or rug in a wealthy woman's drawing room 
may add nothing to the real comfort of any one; yet it 
may embody the excess toil of a thousand girls for a week. 
If each girl had been able to retain that additional frag- 
ment of earnings, it might have meant an excursion on 
Saturday, a concert, some article of womanly adornment, 
a present to a friend, something to give the feel and joy of 
life. Instead of that it is bottled up in that vase to which 
a few satiated ladies may say ^^Ah !" 

When David was a hunted exile in the cave of AduUam, 
he became homesick for his native town and for the spring 
from which he drank as a boy, and he said: ^^Oh that one 
would give me water to drink of the well of Bethlehem 

^ Ecclesiastes iv. 1-3. 



PROFIT VERSUS LIFE 2$1 

which IS by the gate ! '' At that time a PhiHstine war party 
was camped at Bethlehem, but three of David's mighty 
men, for love of their chief, broke through the Hnes of the 
enemy and brought some of the water to David. ^^But 
he would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto Jehovah. 
And he said. Be it far from me, Jehovah, that I should 
do this ! Shall I drink the blood of the men who went in 
jeopardy of their Hves ? " ^ 

Life is the sacred spark of God in us, and the best of 
our race have reverenced it most. Wherever life is held 
precious, and restored and redeemed when broken or soiled, 
there is God's country, and there the law of Christ prevails. 
But in our economic system life is held cheap and wasted 
needlessly, and the play and beauty of hfe are turned into 
weariness. Death rules because love and soHdarity do not 
rule. Brothers are set against brothers in two classes, of 
which one can flourish in luxury, while the other toils in 
want. The exhaustive toil and the want of the one class 
may even be the means to speed and pile up the wealth of 
the other. The Profit of the Few has turned against the 
Life of the Many. God's reign will not come until the 
Profit of all shall support the Life of all. 

^ 2 Samuel xxiii. 13-17. 



CHAPTER III 

COMMERCIALISM AND BEAUTY 

God's country is the home of beauty. God is not only 
the all-wise and all-powerful, but the all-beautiful. The 
connection between religion and beauty, between morality 
and art, is of the closest. The sense of beauty is the morn- 
ing portal of the temple of God by which the young best 
love to enter for worship. Ruskin has taught us that art 
has its roots in the moral life, and that permanent ugliness 
is a product of sin and a producer of brutality. 

The redeemed portions of our social order all cultivate 
beauty. There are few homes so poor that you will not 
find some pathetic attempt at beauty for its own sake. 
In our churches religion long ago entered into partnership 
with architecture, music, and color. As our schools out- 
grow the poverty of ^^the little red schoolhouse" they are 
decorating their walls with pictures. Our cities and States 
are developing beauty in their parks and public buildings 
in just the measure in which they are struggling free from 
the clutch of political avarice. 

How do capitalistic industry and commerce deal with 
the aesthetic life ? 

Human labor beautifies nature. If the soil is well 
tilled, it becomes more fertile year by year. Science has 
furnished labor unparalleled powers to fashion nature ac- 
cording to its will and with wonderful results. Arid lands 
have come to teem with life and verdure ; dreary swamps 
have been redeemed from desolation. But side by side 
with this fertihzing influence of the hand of man goes an 

252 



COMMERCIALISM AND BEAUTY 253 

influence of devastation. I have revisited country sides 
that I knew in wooded glory in my boyhood, and have 
found the trees slashed out and the mountain looking like 
a house rifled by burglars. In a lovely university town of 
Ohio, in which the streets were lined with young and 
vigorous shade trees, a corporation hacked and butchered 
the trees to string its wires more cheaply. The trees now 
stretch out their lopped and dying limbs like deformed 
beggars in the East that wave their handless arms for alms. 
If the State had not stepped in to protect them, the pali- 
sades on the Hudson would have become a mere quarry. 
Two governments tried to preserve the falls of Niagara, 
but the time is coming when we shall stand by the dribbling 
rocks and try to remember how Samson looked when he 
wore his locks and before he had learned to grind corn for 
the Philistines. Nature, our common mother, sits like a 
captive queen among barbarians who are tearing the 
jewels from her hair. Beauty that ages have fashioned 
and that no skill of man can replace is effaced to enrich a 
few persons whose enrichment is of little use to anybody. 
In the Middle Ages the degenerate descendants of the 
Romans knew no other use for the priceless fragments of 
ancient art that lay scattered among the ruins than to 
grind up the marble for lime and mortar. We do the same 
with the inherited beauty of nature. Our trains as we 
approach a great city begin to move through a lane of sign 
boards. The fences and barns along the country roads 
beseech us to pay no attention to the fact that the golden- 
rod and purple aster are in bloom, but to concentrate our 
mental efforts on the fact that Levi, Flannigan, and Schmidt 
will sell us a suit of sweat-shop goods cheaper than any 
other set of Christians. 

These things are done by a form of industry in which 
immediate profit for a few is the animating force. Conse- 
quently the higher needs, the common possessions, and the 



254 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

longer outlook are sacrificed to immediate gain. Capital- 
ism is penny wise and pound foolish. If the State with its 
broader interests and longer perspective had not stepped 
in to restrain the avarice of industry and replace its kill- 
ings, our country would now be stripped of fish and game. 
Capitalism can cut down the timber which unaided nature 
has grown through centuries, but it cannot afford the long 
wait that is needed to grow new forests. It leaves the 
exploited timber lands and turns elsewhere for new profits. 
For any long-range care of nature capitalism is almost 
useless. The Conservation Movement is a national con- 
fession that capitalism, in dealing with the natural re- 
sources of the country, is a national peril. In using up the 
resources of nature faster than we can replace them, we 
graft on our own children, for they will have to live in a 
land of wasted forests, gutted mines, and dried water 
courses. The avarice induced by our economic system sac- 
rifices the future of the race to immediate enrichment. 
From the point of view of a religious evolutionist that is 
one of the greatest of all sins. God and nature are always 
supremely intent on a better future. Now if capitaHsm 
does this with the utilities of nature, what will it do with 
her beauties ? 

It is true that industry and commerce cater wilhngly to 
the sense of beauty. Tirelessly they turn out new fabrics, 
new patterns, new shades of color in glittering profusion. 
But here again the fatal twist of Profit comes in. The 
aim is not to sell a thing because it is beautiful, but to make 
it beautiful because that will sell it. Show windows are 
dressed to attract buyers; advertisements are brilliant to 
attract buyers; buildings are radiant with incandescent 
lights to attract buyers. This is beauty for profit, mere- 
tricious beauty, the studied attractiveness of a painted 
woman. There is a restless, self-assertive egotism in the 
incandescent flashlights that points to self and yells for 



COMMERCIALISM AND BEAUTY 255 

cash. It lacks repose and moral quality. Much of the 
beauty created by commerce is full of lies, as adulterated 
as the food. It is made for mere appearance, and it has 
corrupted and vitiated the conscience of us all. 

The relation of commerce to beauty comes home to us 
in the matter of woman's dress. Our women are the chief 
ministers of beauty in the life of most of us. They used 
to weave, dye, and make their own dress. Now industry 
makes it for them, and the industries that make and handle 
clothes far exceed in the value of their output those that 
make iron, steel, and machinery. The fact that the mak- 
ing of woman's dress is completely commerciaHzed accounts 
for the fashions. They are not steps in the evolution of 
beauty, a permanent approximation toward some form of 
dress that will be comfortable, sanitary, and artistic like 
the robes of the Greeks. They are a succession of arbi- 
trary changes devised by the commercial interests involved 
in order to keep women buying; for whenever fashion 
changes, there is brisk buying and fresh profits. If a 
female archangel should come down from heaven and re- 
veal the eternally beautiful Hnes of dress to women, it 
would be to the interest of all the commercial concerns that 
cater to women to cry down that heavenly pattern after 
one season's run and obliterate the memory of it; for if 
that angeHc style became permanent, what would become 
of trade ? 

Of course the changeableness of woman's dress is not 
wholly due to commercial stimulation. It is a manifes- 
tation of that feminine mutabiHty which has ever been the 
delight and despair of men. A woman's dress is the re- 
sultant of two psychic attractions : the desire to be like 
other women, and the desire to be different from other 
women. That keeps dress on the move. But to many of 
the best women the merry-go-round of fashion is a nauseat- 
ing vertigo. It plunges them in expense, labor, and worry, 



256 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

and when by taking thought they have worked out an 
adaptation of a given fashion to their peculiar sUmness and 
height, another spasmodic contortion of fashion compels 
them to revise their canons of art and do it all over again. 
Some of the more serious Christian movements in history 
tried to break loose from the tyranny of fashion by adopt- 
ing a type of dress that would be both simple and perma- 
nent, and an old-fashioned Quaker lady, a Catholic nun, 
and even a Salvation Army lass in her ugly bonnet are 
proof that simplicity sets off womanly sweetness and indi- 
viduaHty wonderfully well. During the epidemic of big 
hats I noticed a nurse in hospital uniform coming into a 
room full of fashionable women, and she was by all odds 
the best-dressed woman there. 

If left to their own taste, some women would prefer sta- 
bility and some would enjoy change in their dress, but 
Business forces change on the former and stimulates the 
love of change in the latter, and for both creates a social 
driving force before which the individual woman is almost 
helpless. It hustles them into bizarre fashions because 
Business wants to turn over its capital and nothing sane 
happens to be in sight. For several years now our women 
have been wearing hats that were candle extinguishers of 
beauty and reduced thousands of charming heads to 
pitiable insignificance. When the wind blew, any grace 
of carriage became impossible. The women's clubs missed 
an opportunity in 1910. They ought to have organized 
great autos-da-fe all over the country to burn the big 
hats and to hang in effigy all those who compelled them to 
wear them. The world of men would have stood by to 
applaud, and it might have been the beginning of a great 
revival of moraUty and rehgion. 

It is impossible to treat the matter of fashion without 
sarcasm, but truly it is no laughing matter. Women are 
the priestesses of beauty, and when their sense of beauty 



COMMERCIALISM AND BEAUTY 257 

is seduced and distorted for years at a time, it is as bad 
as if the servants of the State yielded to corruption or 
ministers of the Gospel were willing to twist the straight 
word of God. Does it not concern the Kingdom of God 
on earth when an unregenerate economic system so invades 
our better life that good women wear immodest waists and 
indecent skirts, adapted to the professional needs of harlots, 
and trick out their heads with false and unclean things in 
order to look like the notorious mistress of a diseased 
French king? 

There was once a little State which, for size and popula- 
tion, we could tuck away in our vast country and forget, 
but which has exerted a mightier influence in advancing 
the art and the intellect of humanity than our whole great 
nation has yet exerted or seems likely to exert. Athens 
in her palmy days used her wealth for the public good, 
building splendid temples and theaters, and giving her 
citizens leisure to enjoy the means of culture, and by this 
policy she created a community of productive intellects by 
whose side our professors and magazine writers are scrub 
growth. In our country we have followed the opposite 
policy. We have stripped the community and enriched 
individuals. We have handed over all the sources of 
wealth to private exploitation, and so* our communities are 
poor, always on the edge of the debt Kmit and hardly able 
to keep clean. Few of our cities have any public collec- 
tion of art. Few have any statuary to which the eye would 
care to turn often. Few have even fine public buildings. 

Our age is an age of traffic. Our railway stations are 
in their nature great public buildings where men throng, 
and their size and vaulted interiors give scope for archi- 
tectural treatment such as the builders of antiquity might 
have coveted. In the large cities of Germany the station 
buildings are imposing works of architecture, set in parked 
approaches. The cities turn their best face to the arriving 



258 



CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 



guest. Even cities of twenty thousand inhabitants have 
spacious stations with tiled subways to cross the tracks. On 
the other hand, in our American cities the streets about 
the station are usually the ugliest of all, a weedy back yard 
of commercialism and a congenial setting for the station 
building. The ordinary small station is a bald and dirty 
box. Of the larger cities on the great New York Central 
only New York and Albany as yet have ornamental build- 
ings. At the great railway center of Buffalo the station 
is both plain and inadequate. The Union Station at Cleve- 
land, the sixth city of the country, is dark, dirty, and nasty, 
and its passenger accommodations would be poor for a 
city of one tenth its size.^ Why this difference ? In Ger- 
many the railways belong to the various States of the Ger- 
man confederacy. They earn large incomes for the States, 
and the officials at their head are eager to show economy 
and a favorable balance. But their acquisitiveness is 
balanced by considerations of public welfare, and they co- 
operate with the governments of the cities in the interest 
of public beauty. Our railways are owned by private cor- 
porations and run for profit. They boast superior effi- 
ciency, but their efficiency, in so far as it is a fact, is the 
efficiency of capitalism, which is strong in anything that 
lowers cost and increases profit, and weak in anything that 
promotes the common good, but lowers dividends. Their 
strength is seen in the leveling of grades and other engineer- 
ing feats, their weakness in their casualty lists and their 
disregard of beauty. In that respect our station buildings 
can fairly serve as demonstrations how public beauty fares 
when we surrender our public functions and our wealth to 
private and profit-making concerns, and let them erect 
our public buildings. 

1 A fine building is now under construction at Rochester, in which artistic 
idealism has found expression, and a new station has been planned for Cleve- 
land. But why not long ago ? 



COMMERCIALISM AND BEAUTY 259 

Some one ought to show the bearing of the doctrine of 
economic determinism on the history of art. The produc- 
tion of art is bound up with the general social system of 
production. The creation of an opera needs more than 
Mozart's head; it needs the Vienna opera house and all 
that pertains to it. The economic problem for the artist 
is how to get a living while he is producing his work, and 
then how to get it into permanent form and place it before 
the public. When wealth was in the hands of kings, 
nobles, and churchmen, artists were dependent on these 
patrons, and often had to prostitute their art in order to 
minister to the vanity of the powerful. A great hall in 
the Louvre is filled with eighteen huge paintings by the 
great Rubens, describing the courtship and marriage of 
Marie de Medici and Henri IV of France in unappetizing 
detail and mythological embelHshment. The whole series 
reeks with flattery and is a great painted lie. This was the 
task set by wealth in the hands of a prince to a great artist. 
Poor Rubens ! A penny for his thoughts ! The dethrone- 
ment of f eudaHsm and the rise of capitalism has shifted the 
wealth available for art into the hands of a new set of men, 
with greater intelHgence and closer to realities, but with 
less artistic culture than the courts of many monarchs had 
acquired. So artists must paint the baggy faces of the 
Wertheimers and Laubentalers and their interesting wives, 
and choose subjects which such buyers are likely to select 
for their homes. This penaKzes originahty and democracy 
of conception. Artists are in the position of prophets who 
are in the pay of the rich. They must make their art say 
smooth things, and cannot be the bold interpreters of 
human life. 

If artists have no access to the rich, they have to deal 
with middlemen, who take advantage of their poverty or 
bind them by contracts, so that poor artists in Europe are 
often sweated like Jewish tailors. With few exceptions the 



26o CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

great modern French artists suffered for years or all their 
lives in misery. In the year when Millet was painting the 
Gleaners he was near to suicide. In 1859, the year in 
which he painted the Angelus, his wife was facing confine- 
ment and he had no wood in the dead of winter.^ The only 
prosperous years he had, 1 860-1 863, he received $200 a 
month from a picture dealer, and was under contract in 
return to hand over everything he painted or drew. His 
Angelus was painted for an American, who was to pay $300 
for it, but Millet had to sell it to another man for $200. 
The later high prices profited the dealers and not the artist. 
When artists are dead, there is an unearned increment in 
their pictures. 

When rich men are the patrons of art, they usually 
place what they buy in their own homes where only a very 
limited public can enjoy it. This cuts the artist off from 
the spiritual touch with the common people, who might 
pay him the precious perquisite of admiration and love. 
Artists, like orators, are dependent on the answering vibra- 
tions of the common soul. Moreover, the working people 
with all their potential power of appreciation are cut out 
of the audience. They cannot afford to hear high-class 
music or plays, or to buy copyrighted books and pictures. 
Moving picture shows and canned music are their bill of 
fare. The intellectual elite of the working class are the 
most earnest of all hearers, but a large proportion of the 
workers lack the culture to appreciate art even if it is 
offered free. Like religion, art must be experienced in 
youth to be loved through life. In so far as our capitalis- 
tic system deprives the working class of the leisure and 
elasticity which would fit them for the higher pleasures, it 
deprives artists of their most stimulating audience. 

The same causes destroy the soil in which creative 
artistic ability might flourish. In great art centers in the 

1 Romain RoUand, " Millet." 



COMMERCIALISM AND BEAUTY 261 

past handicraftsmen were able to graduate into art by easy 
stages. The modern factory worker would have to cross a 
chasm. The monotony of machine work gives no scope 
for the play of fancy or self-expression. The Lord knows 
what talent and genius dies stillborn in our factories. 
CapitaHsm is not happy with what is individual. It makes 
its profit in mass production; it revels in turning things 
out by the hundred thousand. It kills out the older crafts- 
manship, for instance in Japan. Artistic European workers 
who come to America feel that they are drowned in com- 
merciahsm here. 

So our economic system is not a sincere friend to beauty 
either in nature or art. If profit beckons, the beauties of 
nature are blotted out without remorse. If profit beckons, 
art is used, but only to be soiled somewhat. For the real 
development of beauty we need communities that have 
wealth of their own, a great public with leisure and culture 
enough to enjoy art, and a working class with leisure and 
vitahty enough to develop the artistic talent in gifted 
individuals. Why have so many artists been revolutionists 
at heart ? 



CHAPTER IV 

THE INSTITUTIONS OF LOVE AND THEIR DANGERS 

One of the glories of Christianity is the place it gives to 
love. It sums up all religious duty in love to God, and all 
ethical duty in love to man. It has set before humanity 
as the fullest revelation of God and the highest expression 
of manhood the life of Jesus Christ, whose name is a synon3rm 
of love. It has made love the dominant characteristic in 
the nature of God himself, and therewith has written love 
across the whole universe. 

Love is the force that draws man and man together, the 
great social instinct of the race. It runs through all our 
relations and is the foundation of all our institutions. The 
friendship of classmates, the good will of chance-met stran- 
gers, the fellow-feeling of comrades in a cause, the sense of 
religious brotherhood, are merely different colors of the 
rainbow into which the white light of love is refracted. 
The social mission of Christianity is to make this natural 
instinct strong, durable, pure, holy, and victorious over all 
selfish and hateful passions. The spirit of Christ allies 
itself with all other social forces that make for love. It is 
at enmity with anything that checks love or propagates 
hate. 

No other social organization is so distinctly the institu- 
tion of love as the home. It is formed when a man and a 
woman love each other. In their case the natural friend- 
ship of two human beings is diversified by the play of sex 
difference and intensified by sexual love. If they have 
children, tremendous currents of love are added, running 

262 



THE INSTITUTIONS OF LOVE AND THEIR DANGERS 263 

down to them and up from them. The loves of other 
members of the family, grandparents, brothers, sisters, 
relatives, converge and intersect in a home. Playmates, 
neighbors, guests, bring in their good will. As the knee 
joint of a man is a complicated system of ligatures, so a home 
is an interlocking system of loves. The more the economic 
activities have passed from the home to the shop, the more 
completely has the home become purely an institution of love. 

Because the home is God's country, the valuation put 
on it by us all is exceedingly high. Most women feel 
that their Hfe gets its full meaning and dignity only when 
they can have and make a home. Most men toil with 
little else in mind except to maintain their homes. From 
the point of view of society the home is an expensive 
institution. It would be possible to house us all in dormi- 
tories and feed us in institutions far more cheaply. To 
dupUcate sitting rooms, dining rooms, and kitchens for 
every family is an economic waste unless higher interests 
justify it. Every separate house and cottage of the Amer- 
ican type is an architectural and economic expression of the 
high valuation we put on the home as the institution of 
love and individuality. Christianity and the home have 
constituted an offensive and defensive alliance. Each has 
reenforced the other. Each is crippled when the other is 
hurt. Anything undermining the home is an invasion of 
God's country. 

To-day the home is being hurt and crippled. Indus- 
trialism sweeps the workers together in tightly wedged masses 
in abnormally large cities. Private property in land turns 
over the unearned increase in land values to individuals 
and offers a bonus to anybody who will help to make land 
scarce for the users. Building materials have grown dear 
through the capitalistic exhaustion of the forests and 
through business combinations, and this registers itself in 
contracted homes. 



264 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The wages paid to industrial workers in many lines of 
employment will not support a home, not even a poor one. 
The average annual wage of industrial workers through- 
out the country is about $600, and 75 per cent of them earn 
less. The United States Commissioner of Labor, when inves- 
tigating labor conditions after the strike at Lawrence, Mass., 
in 191 2, found that 7275 of the 21,922 employees of the 
textile mills earned less than $7 even when working 
full time; 36 per cent of these were males.^ The high 
price of the necessaries of life further cuts down the pur- 
chasing power of these wages. A couple with young chil- 
dren to support have to wade through the deep waters of 
poverty. Wife and children are forced to help in earning 
wages. But experience has shown that after this has be- 
come general in any industry, the temporary advantage 
of this sacrifice disappears again, and the whole family by 
incessant toil now earn no more than the father alone 
once earned. 

Such an outlook deters many from marriage. The pru- 
dent go without children. When the wife is away at 
work, the home is bereft of the home maker and loses its 
meaning. Exhaustion and discouragement invite to drink 
and quarrelsomeness. The higher spiritual satisfactions of 
the home are washed away like the soil from a denuded 
mountain side.^ 

This poverty is not the sad necessity of a destitute nation, 
at least not in America. It is the direct result of an eco- 
nomic system in which property and power are in the 
hands of one class, and the other class is comparatively 
helpless. Wages are small in order that profits may be 

1 The report of the Bureau was made by resolution of the Senate, but 
proved to be so voluminous and thoroughgoing that the Senate ordered 
only enough copies to be printed to supply the Senate document room. Was 
this because it was voluminous or because it was thoroughgoing ? 

2 1 have stated some of these points more fully in ''Christianity and the 
Social Crisis," Chapter V, especially pp. 271-279. 



THE INSTITUTIONS OF LOVE AND THEIR DANGERS 265 

large. God's institution, the home, is being broken up to 
increase profit. 

For an increasing portion of the wage-earning and salary- 
earning classes the home is becoming hard to attain at 
all. But when the shelter of the home is locked against 
men, they are exposed to all the storms of unsatisfied desire. 
In the home the primal sex passion is bound up with all 
that is noble, with loyalty, self-sacrifice, child Hfe, common 
memories and hopes. Outside of the home it becomes 
predatory, marauding, piratical, a destroyer of existing 
homes instead of a builder of new homes. Unless we can 
give the people homes, they will have vice. 

In three cities, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City, 
a thorough investigation of vice has been made of late, 
and in each the wretchedness uncovered has been appall- 
ing. One of the wisest of women, Jane Addams, has 
written an illuminating commentary on the facts in her 
book, ^^A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil." Every 
woman who looks forward to exercising the suffrage in 
coming years should read that book as a pledge to the 
Almighty that she proposes to take her citizenship seri- 
ously. 

Miss Addams 's book has a message of great hope, for she 
makes it clear that girls rarely prostitute themselves* from 
any perverse and sinful preference for a hfe of vice. They 
are drawn into it by various influences in combination, 
which are all humanly comprehensible and natural, by 
instincts which we find in our own hearts and in our sisters 
and daughters, such as the love of ease, dress, and excite- 
ment. The white slave traffic has to maintain an inter- 
national and expensive organization, play on the ignorance 
of foreigners and the womanly trustfulness of good girls, 
and finally use alcohol and physical force in order to recruit 
the women needed for the business. The girls are not 
crowding into vice ; they have to be trapped and pushed 



266 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

in. If liquor did- not paralyze their higher instincts and 
unleash the lower, most of the men too would turn in dis- 
gust from that beastly travesty of love. 

There are many causes that are combining to multiply 
immorality: the ignorance of immigrants, the lack of re- 
straint in city life, the volume of travel, erotic literature, 
and the lack of religious teaching in our schools. But the 
recent thorough investigations have driven home the fact 
that the most powerful creator of prostitution is our eco- 
nomic life. In nearly all sections of the industrial world 
the wages of women are too low to support them unaided. 
About 60 per cent of the women workers in the Eastern 
States get less than $325 a year; only 10 per cent get 
more than $500. Working under great strain, they are 
yet unable to make both ends meet or to eke out enough 
for some larger expense like a pair of shoes or a dress. 
Business is battering down their nervous capacity for moral 
resistance. ^^The increasing nervous energy to which 
industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, and the 
speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at 
any moment so register their results upon the nervous 
system of a factory girl as to overcome her powers of re- 
sistance. Many a working girl at the end of a day is so 
hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is 
plainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls go directly 
to bed as soon as they have eaten their suppers. They are 
too tired to go from home for recreation, too tired to read, 
and often too tired to sleep." ^ A girl in financial straits 
^Moes not go out deliberately to find illicit methods of 
earning money, she simply yields in a moment of utter 
weariness and discouragement to the temptations she has 
been able to withstand up to that moment. The long 
hours, the lack of comforts, the low pay, the absence of 
recreation, the sense of good times all about her which she 

1 Jane Addams, "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil," pp. 72, 77. 



THE INSTITUTIONS OF LOVE AND THEIR DANGERS 267 

cannot share, the conviction that she is rapidly losing 
health and charm rouse the molten forces within her. A 
sweUing tide of self-pity suddenly storms the banks which 
have hitherto held her and finally overcomes her instincts 
for decency and righteousness, as well as the habits of clean 
living, established by generations of her forebears." 

Our economic system is therefore a direct cause of pros- 
titution by the fierceness with which it uses up human life 
to make profit. It also causes it by the atmosphere of 
idleness, ease, pleasure, and luxurious habits created in 
social, life by those who live on unearned wealth. The 
women of the upper classes are an unconscious but very 
real source of temptation and enervation to the wage- 
earning girls who are thrown into contact with them. The 
force of temptation is greatest in those lines of employment 
where the two classes come into contact, for instance in 
the department stores and in office work ; it is least in the 
factories where working girls have the stout morality and 
good sense of their own kind to hold them up. The most 
exposed situation of all is domestic service, where one or 
two working women live in social isolation and loneKness 
among people of a higher class.^ 

The men, too, find the way to hell paved by business. 
In former times it was militarism which gathered thousands 
of homeless men and estabhshed slimy pools of vice in 
which they could bathe. To-day similar masses of men 
are gathered in construction camps and wherever labor is 
shifting and poorly paid. What can we expect when low 
wages force men to live with a boarding-boss, sleeping in 
beds occupied by alternating shifts of men? Polygamy 
was maintained by the rich, who could afford to have many 
women ; polyandry is maintained by the poor, where many 
men can afford to support only one woman. It has existed 

1 See the explanation of the peculiar temptations in domestic service by 
Miss Addams, pp. 167-178. 



268 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

in poor communities, for instance among the mountaineers 
of Thibet; it has returned under other forms in the in- 
dustriaHsm of the present day. Slavery was once the sys- 
tem by which the strong worked the weak, and polygamy 
was its sexual corollary; the female slave had to yield her 
womanhood as well as her labor force. Capitalism is the 
system by which the strong are to-day working the weak, 
and prostitution is its sexual corollary. 

Sexual evils, such as adultery and seduction, will always 
exist in human society. Their frequency depends on the 
social control exerted by educated morality and religion. 
Prostitution differs from them by the money element. It 
is vice for gain. Some minimum of this, too, may be a per- 
manent fact in society*. Even in socialism a woman might 
prostitute herself to gain industrial advancement or po- 
litical power for herself or for some one whom she loved. 
But mass prostitution, such as we know, is inseparable 
from poverty and from class differences. SociaHsm de- 
serves our gratitude for insisting on this fact which the 
Church has failed to see or emphasize. 

The economic influences, to which reference has been 
made, work indirectly and unintentionally toward the 
breakdown of the family and the multiplication of vice. 
The men and women who profit by our economic system 
would angrily and, in most cases, justly deny that they 
would knowingly take a dollar that had helped to push a 
girl into the Hfe of a prostitute. On the other hand there 
are business interests that do it knowingly. The saloons 
that cater to women ; the dance halls that encourage inde- 
cent dances and supply long intermissions for the consump- 
tion of liquor; pleasure resorts and excursion steamers; 
theaters, music halls, and moving-picture shows that use the 
ever ready attractiveness of sex interests, — are all smooth- 
ing the downward road — and they know it. The liquor 
trade is a big section of our econoinic apparatus, and it is 



THE INSTITUTIONS OF LOVE AND THEIR DANGERS 269 

inseparably bound up with sexual vice. Where recreation 
is supplied by commercial agencies and run for profit, 
they find it profitable to encourage the use of Kquor and 
to play on the sex interest, because under these two in- 
fluences money is spent most freely. That fundamental 
characteristic of the capitaUstic system, the necessity of 
making profit, logically works out these results when capi- 
tal is invested that way. 

In recent years prostitution itself has become an or- 
ganized business on a large scale, served by commissioned 
agents and using the modern means of communication. 
Just as capitahsm generally has outgrown the little store 
and shop, so the white slave trafiic is outgrowing the simple 
ways of the madame and developing systematic methods 
for getting and serving customers, and recruiting its serv- 
ice. It has to overcome many difficulties, pay taxes to the 
poUce and poHticians, and keep the reformers from but- 
ting in, but the profits are enormous, and it overcomes the 
difficulties with that shrewdness and energy which Busi- 
ness always develops when big profit is in sight. 

Prostitution destroys the health and degrades the person- 
ality of the victims. It is also the destroyer of the home 
as an institution. Every prostitute is the competitor of 
every wife. When prostitution is once set up and organized, 
it has to go out for trade Hke every other active business. 
From the house of prostitution secret fines of influence 
run into the respectable homes of the city. Incurable dis- 
eases contracted there leap over the chasm of social and 
moral separation, and blight the health and the affection 
of chaste and noble women. The memories and imagina- 
tions stocked by images of vice are a permanent suggestive 
force that undermines the single-minded loyalty of the home. 

"IVe taken my fun where IVe found it, 
An' now I must pay for my fun, 



270 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

For the more you 'ave known o' the others 
The less will you settle to one/' ^ 

Theories of free love get their active force through per- 
sonal or social conditions. In all industrial cities are large 
bodies of men and women, many of them highly intelligent 
and thoughtful, who see no way of marrying without a 
drop in their standard of living which they do not care to 
risk. Business and modern ways of recreation throw the 
sexes together in a freedom formerly unknown. They feel 
all the old attraction of man and woman, but no hope of 
love under the old standards of morality. They are de- 
manding to know what they are to do. Under such con- 
ditions the loose theories on sex relations, with which happily 
married people may toy in safety, spring into grim insist- 
ence. The wish will be father to the thought; desire 
will justify the intellect in breaking bounds. Socialist 
thought carries so large an ingredient of free-love theories 
because it is the product of these proletarian intellectuals. 
The ultimate blame for the theories rests with the condi- 
tions that secrete the theories as germ diseases secrete 
toxic forces in the blood. 

If the home is the institution of love, and if love is of 
God, then the forces that cripple home life are an invasion 
of God's dominions. We have seen what a large direct 
and indirect influence our economic life has in breaking 
down the home and building up vice from the rotting 
remnants. If all the fallen girls of a city, including all 
those who lapse into evil occasionally and secretly, could be 
brought together and could formulate the causes of their 
sin and ruin intelligently, as God sees them, it would con- 
stitute an accusation against our unregenerate business Hfe 
that would drive us frantic. If any one of us found an 
individual ruining his wife, his sister, his daughter, or his 

1 Kipling, " Barrack-room Ballads." 



THE INSTITUTIONS OF LOVE AND THEIR DANGERS 27 1 

sweetheart, his moral indignation would probably grow 
so fierce that it would sweep all accustomed restraints 
away, and pubHc sentiment would set the letter of the law 
aside to justify almost any violence he would commit in 
his anger. To any one who has learned to think socially, 
and to understand the collective forces of society which 
redeem or ruin their thousands, our economic system looms 
up Kke a great collective ravisher of our women, and what 
shall we do with him ? 



CHAPTER V 

PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 

Selfishness and the social spirit both belong to the'make- 
up of human nature. Egoism is the original warp, and 
self-sacrificing devotion for others is the woof that is woven 
in if character develops well. Both are necessary and use- 
ful. They blend in different proportions according to 
maturity and elevation of character. Except in fine individ- 
uals or in special relations, as in the patriots and mothers 
of the race, the instinct of self-interest is stronger than 
that of devotion to the common interest, and if the two 
come in conflict, the common good suffers. Society always 
forms a self-protecting league to keep down the excessive 
selfishness of its members by various forms of condem- 
nation, and to develop public devotion by education, 
patriotism, and religion. The ideal situation is created 
when self-interest and the common interest run in the 
same direction, and selfishness of its own will bends its 
stout shoulders to the yoke of public service. A community 
that does not solve the problem of yoking the able to the 
service of the common good finds its strongest sons its most 
insidious enemies. 

The town, the city, the state, the nation are the most 
inclusive organizations for the common good, offering every 
citizen a thousand forms of protection and service. The 
problem for our selfishness then is, how to contribute as 
little in the way of taxes and service to the community, 
and how to get as many benefits from it as possible, — 
especially somewhat more than our neighbor is getting. 
If any man has never played at this game, he is a white 

272 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 273 

» 

raven. The ^^puU" is as old as history. Cain seems to 
have suspected Abel of working a pull on the Lord, and 
^'influence'' will last far into Kingdom Come. Every 
poUtical community has the perpetual task of making its 
members toe the mark, just as every family has to work 
out a fair division of the chores on the one hand and the 
pudding on the other, and finds it an intricate business. 

A community of equals, however, usually succeeds in 
protecting itself against the selfishness of its members and 
establishing a rough justice of paying and getting. The 
danger begins when any individual, or any organized group, 
becomes so strong that they can defy or paralyze the 
organization that serves the common good. For instance, 
under feudalism great vassals could become so powerful 
through the lands and privileges bestowed on them that 
they could defy the king's courts and the military powers 
of the Crown, and set up as a menacing State within the 
State. These feudal nobles were fundamentally great 
landowners, and their power corresponds to that wielded 
by the lords of industry in an industrial age. To take 
another instance, the Church is an organized group held 
together by the tremendous force of religion, and it, too, 
may become a dangerous power within the State, using 
political methods to extort special favors and concessions. 
Its power becomes intolerable when its spiritual cohesion is 
increased by large vested wealth and semipolitical power, 
as in the case of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle 
Ages and the Mormon hierarchy to-day. The Mafia is 
a secret organization in Italy, which seems first to have 
grown up among disbanded mercenaries in Sicily. It has 
protected its members, levied tribute on others, punished 
its enemies, and paralyzed and defied the State. The 
East India Company and the Netherlands Company sent 
ambassadors and waged war like sovereign States, and 
hunted down interloping competitors Hke pirates. They 



274 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

believed in the ^^ closed shop." These are simply historical 
examples to show how individuals or social groups may set 
up special interests that antagonize the common good and 
threaten the very stability of the State as the organ of the 
common welfare. 

Now, this is exactly the condition that is growing up 
among us under new forms. We have individuals in our 
country so rich and powerful that it is practically incon- 
ceivable that they should be brought to book and punished 
like ordinary citizens. In every community there is a 
group of propertied men who may not be organized, but 
who act in sympathy, and the community has to put forth 
tremendous efforts to enforce its will against their will, 
even for a short time. Our great corporations are States 
within the State ; some of them employ more men and own 
more property than sovereign commonwealths ; they enjoy 
semipublic powers in law, and in times of trouble build 
fortifications and assemble armed forces of their own. On 
many points the interest of these powerful groups is identical 
with the common good, and that is the saving element in 
the situation. But to some extent their interest is pitted 
against the common good. They need not only the ordinary 
protection of life and property which every citizen expects, 
but special legal privileges, protection against competitors, 
grants of mineral resources, franchises, and patent mo- 
nopoUes. They want these privileges as cheaply, securely, 
and permanently as possible. It is manifestly not for the 
common good to alienate coal lands permanently or give 
them away for a song. But that is what a corporation 
would Uke best. Its private interest runs one way, and the 
common good another. After they have obtained privi- 
leges men want freedom to exploit them with a minimum 
of State interference and restriction, and they now have 
their wealth and vested interests to back them in dealing 
with the officers of the community. 



M 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 275 

By granting away a multitude of public possessions and 
powers, we have armed the natural selfishness of the pos- 
sessors with the means of blocking the common good. We 
have enlisted the interests of the ablest men in the com- 
munity against its welfare. If a city built and owned a 
street railway, it would sell bonds at a moderate rate of 
interest. Every citizen would be directly interested in 
having efficient service, and in having politics clean in order 
that service might be efficient. Those who invested in the 
bonds would be interested in the financial stability of the 
city and its undertakings, but their bonds would earn no 
more, whether the railway charged a five-cent or a three- 
cent fare. On the other hand, when a corporation is given 
a franchise to use the streets for its business, it not only 
sells bonds with a fixed rate of interest, but also issues stock 
with a fluctuating rate of income. The dividends on the 
stock will be large if the company runs crowded cars, 
charges a five- cent fare and an extra for transfers, and works 
its employees twelve hours a day. On all these points the 
private interest of the stockholders runs against the com- 
mon good, and as the stockholders are usually the wealthy 
and influential men, we have practically organized these 
able men into a force to hinder the welfare of the city. In 
order to protect its lucrative excesses from public inter- 
ference the street railway must secure influence in local 
politics, and that again may paralyze the efficiency of the 
city government in every other direction. 

The antagonism between private interest and public 
welfare is most glaring where private interest gets its profit 
out of social conditions which the moral sentiment of the 
community has outgrown and repudiated. The slave-hold- 
ing oKgarchy which ruled the South before the War num- 
bered only about ten thousand men.^ But to protect 
their private interest in an immoral source of profit, they 

^ References in Simons, " Social Forces in American History," Chapter XX. 



276 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

forced an outgrown and inefficient form of labor on their 
communities, kept the poor whites in poverty, retarded the 
industrial development of the South by one generation or 
more, muzzled and perverted the social conscience of their 
people, and were willing permanently to disrupt the Union. 
The private interest that has invested its money in the whole- 
sale and retail liquor business is seeking to fasten on an 
angry people a relic of moral barbarism which the awakened 
conscience and the scientific intellect of the world are com- 
bining to condemn. In such cases we can readily recognize 
the clash between private interest and the common good. 
But there are other cases, more respectable and not so 
clear. For instance : the Tobacco Trust encouraging the 
cigarette evil ; poisonous patent medicines and adulterated 
food breaking down the health of the people ; yellow jour- 
nalism pandering to the love of excitement and sex passion 
to increase sales; the Western Union hiring little boys to 
do its messenger work and sending them to saloons and 
houses of prostitution at night; respectable capital main- 
taining murderous tenements because they return 15 per 
cent to 25 per cent in rent. The gold-mining industries 
in and around Johannesburg in the Transvaal have con- 
centrated a quarter of a million of kafirs in compounds, 
segregating them from their families because that is cheap. 
As a result of this unnatural condition the outrages on 
white women have put the whole community under terror 
and created a tension between the races which threatens 
massacres. By child labor the new industries of the present 
South are using up the manhood and womanhood on which 
the future South must build its greatness. High food prices 
are pressing on the health of every family that lives on its 
own work. The common good demands the elimination 
of the middlemen and their profits. But the middlemen 
do not want to be ehminated and block any public measure 
that will put the consumer in more direct touch with the 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 277 

producer, such as genuine public markets and the parcels 
post. If a staple crop is short, public interest would 
demand that the supply be economized and distributed in 
such a way that prices will be kept as low as possible. Pri- 
vate interest sees its opportunity in the public disaster, 
buys up the supply in advance, accentuates the shortage, 
and extorts extraordinary profits. Public interest demands 
that a new invention be promptly added to the general 
equipment of civilization, and the inventor rewarded by a 
moderate royalty and by public praise. Private interest 
has often taken advantage of the necessities of the inventor 
to buy him out for a trifle, and has then held up the progress 
of society during the life of the patent by monopoly prices. 
Capital is cosmopohtan. It does not follow the flag; 
it follows its one guiding star — Profit. Individual business 
men may be keenly patriotic and loyal, but Capital col- 
lectively comes close to being ^Hhe Man without a Country." 
If higher returns are offered abroad, it will seek investment 
there with the dispassionate single-mindedness of water 
seeking its level. American capital is now building up 
Chinese railways and industries, and so speeding the day 
when American industry will have to meet the full force of 
Chinese competition. The American people have long 
taxed themselves in order to foster certain industries, and 
now these same industries, fed by tariff favors, are selling 
their goods more cheaply in Europe than in our own coun- 
try. Our nation has endowed the great railways with an 
empire of land five time^ the acreage of Ohio ; ^ States and 
communities have given them milHons in bonuses and 
bounties to aid railway construction. As an expression of 
patriotic gratitude they have defrauded the people and 
corrupted the governments. There is hardly a State that 

^ Railroads and other corporations have received from the Federal Govern- ■ 
ment and from States 190,000,000 acres. Homesteaders have been given 
only 115,000,000. The Government has sold 180,000,000 acres. 



278 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

has not been dominated by its great railway. The inflow 
of immigrants from the south and east of Europe was first 
set going by corporations that needed cheap and docile 
labor to keep down the wages and the spirit of the native 
American workingmen. Their coming has since been 
stimulated systematically by the great transportation inter- 
ests that make their heaviest profits from the steerage 
passengers. These private interests have worked against 
the common good. They have burdened our cities with 
an undigested mass of alien people ; they have lowered the 
standard of living for millions of native Americans; they 
have checked the propagation of the Teutonic stock ; 
they have radically altered the racial future of our nation; 
and they have set a new destiny for our national religion. 
If in the next thirty years the Cathohc population out- 
numbers the Protestant, and if the Church then applies 
Roman theories about Church and State to American life 
and politics, we shall owe that serious situation in part to 
the capitalistic interests that overcame the poverty and 
conservatism of the European peasantry and set this mass 
immigration moving. 

A war is the occasion on which the maximum of self- 
sacrifice for the common good is demanded from the mass 
of individuals. The people have to bear heavy taxes, requi- 
sitions, and damage to their property. Countless families 
see their sons go to sickness or death for the protection of 
their country. In a popular war a passion of devotion seizes 
all. But when the men of the nation come out to fight, 
Capital goes into hiding. Securities fall in price. The na- 
tion has to pay a dollar to get a loan of ninety cents, eighty 
cents, seventy cents. The greater the need of money, the 
higher the price of it. Men are drafted; money is not, 
except in taxes. After the Civil War certain great capital- 
ists took pride in the fact that they had bought government 
papers and staked their fortunes on the success of their 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 279 

country. They felt they had done something out of the 
ordinary. Yet, reckoned in terms of humanity, or judged 
by the eyes of him who praised the widow's mites, a money 
king losing half his millions and keeping the other half would 
not be in the same class with the plainest little woman who 
gave her boy, the fruit of her own body, the darling of her 
soul, and the hope of her old age. 

High finance is often praised as a power making for the 
peace of nations. That is doubtless true. Money is timid 
and loves peace. A war hampers the free flow of business. 
But Capital is quite ready to push a nation to the verge of 
war if that serves its purposes. The big interests that 
build dreadnaughts and manufacture ammunition are a 
very powerful factor in keeping the nations armed to the 
teeth in times of peace. The capitalists who invest their 
money at high rates in the securities of shaky states like 
Turkey or some of the South American republics are always 
ready to use their country as a debt-collecting agency and 
to threaten the peace of the world. The activities of the 
Western nations in the far East all have as their objective 
the safety of investments and the extension of markets for 
the capitaKst class. No war is fought without shouting 
the watchwords of the common good ; but rarely, if ever, 
is any war fought in which private interests are not the 
real force demanding the war. On the other hand when 
commercial interests see no profit in a war, no moral or 
patriotic interest counts. It was Northern business that 
tried to suppress abolitionist agitation because sectional 
antagonism hurt trade. In 1812 New England merchants 
were opposed to our war with England for business reasons, 
and they did all they could to cripple our government, sup- 
plying food to the British ships, refusing to subscribe to 
the national loan, encouraging their mihtia to rebel, and 
advocating secession.^ 

1 Babcock, " Rise of American Nationality/' pp. 156-158. 



28o CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Great numbers of capitalists laid the foundation for their 
fortunes in our Civil War. Army supplies opened up a 
tremendous market for uniforms and blankets, arms and 
ammunitions, and the unchanging character of these masses 
of goods gave the widest scope to the wholesale methods of 
capitalism. But Capital was not satisfied with legitimate 
profits. ^^So tremendous was the graft in connection with 
contracts for military supplies that most historians draw 
back in horror when they have lifted but a corner of the 
thick blanket of concealment that those who pro^ted by 
the plunder have drawn over the mess. One Congres- 
sional committee, headed by Robert Dale Owen, son of 
Robert Owen, the Utopian Sociahst, uncovered frauds of 
$17,000,000 in $50,000,000 worth of contracts." ^ One of 
the main objects of the Federal campaign was to prevent 
the exportation of cotton from the South in order to cripple 
Southern finances. From the point of view of the North, 
to assist in marketing cotton gave aid and comfort to the 
enemy and was treasonable. But when cotton was ten 
cents a pound in the South and fifty cents in the North, the 
profit was too great for patriotism. Northern merchants, in 
collusion with federal army ofiicers, passed contraband cotton 
over the line, thereby prolonged the war, the outcome of 
which was inevitable, sacrificed the fives of additional men 
on both sides, and increased the debt resulting from the 
war. Private interest was against the common good. 

The distorting influence exerted by private financial 
interests on American political life is so familiar that it 
scarcely needs discussion. It is fair to say that back of 
every chronic corruption has been some private interest 
that needed silence or favors. ^^As the smoke lifts we can 
mark just who are resisting law and corrupting government. 
In the cities the fight is chiefly with the vice caterers and the 
public-service corporations. The former want a ^wide- 

1 Simons, " Social Forces in American History," p. 280. 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGADSTST THE COMMON GOOD 28 1 

open' town. The latter want unhampered enjoyment of 
their monopoly power. Battling along with these big 
interests are bankers scheming for deposits of city funds, 
rookery landlords in terror of the health-officer, business 
men intent on grabbing an alley or a water-front, and con- 
tractors eager to ^job' public works.'' ^ When private 
interests want something that is against public interest, they 
are willing to pay for the favor. After a time those in con- 
trol get the appetite, and levy blackmail even on under- 
takings that serve the public in legitimate ways. Cor- 
ruption in politics is simply the application of commercial 
methods and principles to the administration of govern- 
ment. In business the middleman charges a commission 
when he puts through a deal between two parties. Why 
should he not do so in pohtics ? In business a man who 
controls a commodity will charge a monopoly price and 
would be considered a fool if he did not. A set of men con- 
trolling a legislature or a city administration have mo- 
nopoly control of the machinery that turns out franchises or 
contracts. Why should they not charge a price to those 
who want the goods ? It is proof of the regenerate condi- 
tion of the State that what is legitimate in Business is a 
crime in the State. 

The most influential and permanent legislative body in 
the nation, the United States Senate, was notoriously 
under the control of the great Interests for years, and in 
many respects they turned a body that is to serve the 
common good into a force that betrayed it. This is the 
essence of treason. The Senators were appointed by the 
railroads and express companies, and they in turn nomi- 
nated the federal judges and fixed in the courts, which are 
now the most influential organization of government, a 
number of men who are constitutionally predisposed to 
side with the private interests against the common good. 

1 Professor E. A. Ross, " Sin and Society," p. 165. 



282 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The tenure of the judges is such that only the slow action 
of death or a revolution can change the bias thus set up 
for years to come. Even five years ago there was still 
general confidence that the courts had remained untouched 
by commercialism and faithful to the common good. That 
conviction is now slowly disintegrating as our political 
education is going on. The entire upheaval in the political 
alignment of 191 2, the demand for direct primaries, for 
direct legislation, for the recall of judges, for the popular 
election of senators, are an expression of the profound and 
durable conviction of the nation, drawn from a fearfully 
costly process of education, that our whole political organ- 
ization, as it stood ten years ago, had been turned into an 
instrument to victimize the people on behalf of private 
interests. Really, nothing more damning can be said than 
this tremendous verdict of a whole nation. 

As business outgrows the automatic checks of competi- 
tion the need for government inspection, investigation, in- 
terference, and control becomes constantly greater if the 
common good is not to be surrendered helplessly to mo- 
nopoly extortion. Publicity and a clear recognition of the 
facts have become as essential to the body politic in its 
complex modern life as free and unobstructed action of the 
brain is to the physical body. But that is what the great 
private interests do not want. They invariably resist 
investigation and seek to paralyze all private and public 
agencies of scrutiny and publicity. '^They are able to gag 
critics, hobble investigators, hood the press, and muzzle the 
law. Drunk with power, in office and club, in church and 
school, in legislature and court, they boldly make their 
stand, ruining the innocent, shredding the reputations of 
the righteous, destroying the careers and opportunities of 
their assailants, dragging down pastor and scholar, pubhcist 
and business man, from livelihood and influence, unhorsing 
alike faithful public servant, civic champion, and knight- 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 283 

'errant of conscience, and all the while gathering into loath- 
some captivity the souls of multitudes of young men.''* 

We should expect that the persons in charge of an orphan 
asylum, a reformatory, or any charitable agency would turn 
their minds to the task of finding out what multiplies or- 
phans, what demoralizes half-grown boys ^and girls, and 
what brings paupers and defectives into institutions faster 
than charity can put them on their feet. Yet Mr. Edward 
T. Devine, editor of the Survey, in his presidential address 
before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections 
in 1906 said : ^*I have yet to find the report of an asylum 
or reformatory that deals intelligently and fearlessly with 
these questions.'' He said that all forms of pauperism, 
degeneracy, and dependence require a conjunction between 
individual weakness and an overt temptation or unfavorable 
condition which would not exist if it were not to the advan- 
tage of some other party. ^^The most profitable task of 
modern philanthropy is to find that other party and to deal 
by radical methods with him." Yet philanthropy dares 
not undertake what is evidently its chief intellectual task. 
The horrible exploitation and robbery practiced by com- 
mercial concerns on helpless prisoners through connivance 
of the State is the one subject that cries for discussion wher- 
ever prisons are mentioned. Yet the American Prison 
Association has apparently covered the subject of contract 
prison labor with decent silence, and it was only the per- 
sistence of one plucky woman, Miss Kate Barnard, State 
Commissioner of Charities in Oklahoma, that forced the 
convention in 1911 to give room for its discussion. When 
she appealed to the religion and humanity of her hearers, 
she carried the audience by storm, and a strong committee 
was appointed to investigate the whole subject.^ 

^ Professor E. A. Ross, '' Sin and Society," p. 99. 

'^Survey, Nov. 4, 191 1. Several magazines have published articles on 
prison labor in 191 1 and 191 2. See, for instance, the articles by Julian 
Leavitt, American Magazine, July, 191 1, February, March, April, 191 2. 



284 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

If a man were caught in the house of an enemy/ and he 
should perceive from indubitable symptoms that a subtle 
poison was being conveyed to him in his food, which was 
acting on his nerves in such a way that they no longer gave 
a clear and trustworthy report of what his eyes saw and his 
ears heard, but filled his mind with hallucinations, he would 
doubtless feel that his case was desperate, and that he must 
keep his brain in working order though he starved. The 
press performs for modern society the function of the 
nerves. It registers the facts, communicates them to the 
centers concerned, and spreads before the community the 
data on which pubUc action must be based. If the press 
purposely states what is false, or colors and unbalances 
what is true, because it is controlled by some ulterior motive, 
then it breaks faith with the pubUc and becomes a treacher- 
ous force to be watched. Hurry, carelessness, ignorance, 
and party passion we can allow for because they are human, 
but tampering with the public intelHgence is a crime against 
the common good. But precisely this seems to be done, and 
very widely. As evidence of it we have the fact that the 
editorial page has almost lost its old-time power to lead the 
people, and we have repeatedly had the spectacle of all the 
papers in a city talking one way and their readers over- 
whelmingly voting the other way. Since the people have 
learned to distrust the editorials, the poison is administered 
by means of doctored news. The most important events, 
facts which tremendously concern a people that is fighting 
for its freedom and its property, are passed over with sus- 
picious lightness of touch. Other articles opposing public 
ownership or direct legislation are so full of facts and so 
carefully written that we wonder what man in that news- 
paper office turned out such material, or whether perhaps 
it was furnished by the press bureau of some big Interest. 
The newspaper, like all the other higher organs of social 
Hfe, has gradually come under the control of capitalistic 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 285 

organization and methods. The days of the great editors 
who controlled their papers and made them serve their 
convictions, the days of Greeley, Dana, Halstead, Medill, 
are almost gone. The journaUst has become the hired man 
of a corporation. A paper is owned and controlled by one 
or more capitahsts, who are in the newspaper business for 
profit, directly and indirectly. By their other investments, 
their business relations, and their social sympathies they are 
in touch with the interests of property, and if they were 
not, their advertisers would compel them to be. Mr. 
William Marion Reedy, the brilHant editor of the St. Louis 
Mirror, speaking before his professional associates of the 
Missouri Press Association in 1908, drew a profoundly sad 
picture of the pseudohberty of the press. At the close he 
tried to cheer up by mentioning the agencies through which 
a path could still be kept open for free and honest thought. 
One was pamphlet Hterature, the other the comparatively 
free country newspapers. The former would be a return to 
the one-horse methods of our fathers before the newspaper 
had been developed ; the latter is an appeal to the rural and 
noncapitahstic portions of present-day society to come and 
save the rest of us. This summary of Mr. Reedy's hopes is 
more eloquent of his despair than any of the black facts he 
recounted. He warned the country editor who might 
attempt to speak freely, that ''he will find that all the 
machinery for the making of pubhc opinion is in the hands 
of people whose interest it is that pubUc opinion shall in 
no way interfere with their graft. He will find his every 
mail burdened with printed slips from various publicity 
bureaus, which he can use free, and in every case he will 
find that the purpose and purport of this slip matter is to 
bolster up some great private interest built upon public 
rights and property, or to discredit some man or movement 
proposing to put a check to the aggrandizement of such 
wealth by the restoration to the community of the rights 



286 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

which have been filched away from it through the con- 
nivance of corrupt representatives/' ^ 

Within an average Hfetime we have watched the private 
interests grow as when boys roll a snowball on the ground 
in moist snow. They have amalgamated, combined, and 
come under centralized management with increasing sv^dft- 
ness and precision. In 191 1 forty-nine railways with over 
four billions of capital stock were owned by 310,581 holders ; 
sixty-seven industrial concerns with over three billions of 
stock were owned by 435,640 stockholders. But individ- 
uals often hold stock in a number of concerns. If all dupli- 
cation of names was cut out, and all the little people were 
eliminated who hold a few shares as a nest egg, the owner- 
ship of this enormous wealth would probably simmer down 
to a hundred thousand persons. But the actual control of 
these seven billions is in the hands of far fewer still. It 
would be possible to assemble around one table a number of 
gentlemen who could control the bulk of the mobile wealth 
of a nation of ninety million souls. Mr. George M. Reynolds, 
of the Continental and Commercial Bank of Chicago, 
speaking to a family gathering of bankers in December, 
191 1, said: ^^I believe the money power now lies in the 
hands of a dozen men. I plead guilty to being one, in the 
last analysis, of these men." ^ A very few persons control 
the Clearing House Association and the Stock Exchange in 
New York. They can withdraw privileges from banks and 
corporations and put them out of business, withhold credit 
from new enterprises that would compete with their inter- 
ests, create bull and bear markets, and if they should so 
determine, cause a national commercial crisis.^ The safety 

1 Reedy, " The Myth of a Free Press." The address can be obtained 
from the Mirror, St. Louis, for five cents. 

2 Quoted in the autobiography of Senator La Follette, American Maga- 
zine, July, 191 2. He says that the Proceedings in which this utterance was 
printed have since been suppressed. 

^ Many sober observers beheve that the crisis of 1908 was purposely 
started by certain great financial interests. 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 287 

and welfare of the nation is at their mercy and depends on 
their respect for the law and their concern for the pubHc 
good. But great power inevitably weakens the force of 
moral restraint. Kings have always had a moral code of 
their own ; the crimes of common people were the peccadil- 
loes of princes. There is ample indication that our Lords 
of Capital are no longer on the ordinary plane of restraint, 
but, like Nietzsche's superman, have risen beyond the realm 
of Good and Evil. In the last panic, for instance, the banks 
refused to return money to those who had deposited it with 
them and created a new currency which had no more legal 
standing than any counterfeit, and no one was punished for it. 
The tremendous power of the private interests has 
created a malaria of timidity in American life. When a 
great industrial plant has been estabhshed in a town for 
some years, the real estate values, the retail business, and the 
jobs of the workingmen are so dependent on its continuance, 
that if there is any threat of its removal, the whole commun- 
ity will kiss the feet of the corporation and promise to be 
good. The Illinois Steel Company for years made new land 
at South Chicago by dumping its slag in Lake Michigan, 
for which it had no legal sanction. Public Works Commis- 
sioner Joseph Medill Patterson, being a sociaUst, refused 
permission for further construction of that kind and brought 
suit to recover the land made. The citizens thought this 
obstacle was the cause for the erection of the great plant 
of the Company at Gary and two hundred of them went 
1 to the State capital at their own expense and lobbied for 
j two weeks for a bill permitting the company to fill in the 
lake front at a nominal expense.^ On Sept. 30, 191 1, the 
great dam of the pulp mill at Austin, Pa., broke and a 
wave of death and destruction swept away the town. The 
dam had been cracked and unsafe, and the people knew it 
imenaced their Hves. The town authorities or any number 

^ John A. Fitch in the Survey, 191 1, pp. 1146 and 11 59. 



288 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of citizens could have sued for protection and the courts 
had power to order the dam strengthened or destroyed, but 
no such collective protest was made. Why not? ^^ The 
answer is perhaps sadder than the Httle processions which 
tracked the wet ground about the morgue. It shows a 
predominantly American community so saturated with 
dependence upon an outside power from which it drew its 
liveUhood that its very instinct for self-preservation was 
inhibited. Nor has it so far recovered itself, under the 
sting of the disaster, as to express an appreciable resent- 
ment toward those in whose power it was to do whatever 
might have been done to remove the danger. Two weeks 
after the catastrophe, not even a damage suit had been 
started." ^ The old American spirit of self-reliance that 
was bred on the Western frontier will weaken as the fron- 
tier disappears. The present insurgent movement in the 
West is the last chance to harness that splendid rebel force 
to the salvation of the nation. If that fails, we must look 
to the immigrant Jews and sociaKsts to rescue the Hberties 
of America for the native born. 

To a Christian mind the ugHest fact is the vindictive- 
ness with which the private interests fight righteousness. 
We can understand how honorable men have come t9 under- 
pay their workers, employ child labor, demand rebates, 
and even bribe aldermen. But when the public conscience 
has awakened and seeks to end these collective wrongs, why 
do these men strike and hack at the hands that are trying 
to free them from a situation in which they are more or less 
forced to do questionable things? The real hindrance 
to every reform movement and philanthropic undertaking 
lies, not in the ignorance or viciousness of the people, but 
in the active and intelligent opposition of those who derive 
profit from wrong or inhumanity. Christian theology 
has been right in locating sin deeper than in ignorance. It 

1 Graham R. Taylor, " A Man-made Flood," in the Survey, Nov. 4, 1911. 



PRIVATE INTERESTS AGAINST THE COMMON GOOD 289 

IS no slight task to wean a nation from the age-long customs 
of alcoholism, or to reconstruct a mass of unsanitary houses 
for the proper housing of the people. But if we merely had 
to save the present drunkards and teach the young to ab- 
stain from drink, and if we merely had to overcome the 
architectural and financial difficulties of the housing prob- 
lem, we could shout for joy, for our salvation would be nigh. 
What makes these reforms hard is the mahgnant fighting 
force created by the profits of the liquor business and the 
rents of rotten tenements. The Pure Food Bill would have 
passed years before if the capital interested in adulteration 
had not fought action, and it would be administered more 
efficiently to-day if the same interests were not crippling 
its enforcement. 

Wherever any reformer has shown persistent determina- 
tion to loosen the clutch of privilege, he has been made to 
suffer for it. If he merely suppressed vice, he was en- 
dangered politically, though he might be supported by the 
high-class business community. But if he dealt coura- 
geously with the public service corporations, he found him- 
self matched against a force with which few have wrestled 
successfully. Pingree in Michigan, Golden Rule Jones in 
Toledo, Henry George in New York, Tom L. Johnson in 
Cleveland, are through with their fight, and we can lay the 
j civic crown on their graves. They fought for us. ^^ There 
is not a man in the United States to-day who has tried hon- 
estly to do anything to change the fundamental conditions 
that make for poverty, disease, vice and crime in our cities, 
i in our courts, and in our legislatures, who, at the very time 
i in which his efforts seemed most Kkely to succeed, has not 
been suddenly turned upon and rent by the great news- 
paper pubHcations." ^ And they were mere agents of 
larger interests. The labor movement has been one of 

the strongest and, on the whole, one of the most beneficent 

li 

1 Reedy, " The Myth of a Free Press," p. 15. 
u 



290 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

reformatory influences in modern life.^ As for socialism, 
even its opponents are admitting that it has even now 
accompHshed more to better the condition of the working 
class in Europe and to force the question of international 
peace on the military powers than any other influence. 
Yet both the labor movement and sociaHsm have been 
bitterly opposed by the whole capitalistic world. 

The self-interest of the individual is a necessary part of 
human nature and may be a beneficent force in human 
society. It would be a calamity to rob this instinct of its 
incentives and its motive force. We want free, strong, 
self-reliant men with elbow room for action. But when a 
theory of so-called economic individualism has resulted in 
turning the property of a nation over to a limited group ; 
in equipping them with rights and powers which only the 
community wield ; in pitting the self-interest of the most 
resourceful men against the public welfare ; in giving them 
power to hold up the progress of humanity by extorting 
monopoly profits; in cowing public opinion, persecuting 
the truth tellers, and hog-tying the State, — then that 
theory has gone to seed and it is time to plow the ground 
for a new crop. '^It is a condition and not a theory that 
confronts us.'' With unanimous nioral judgment mankind 
has always loved and exalted those who sacrificed their 
self-interest to the common welfare, and despised those who 
sold out the common good for private profit. The cross 
of Christ stands for the one principle of action ; the bag of 
Judas stands for the other. God's country begins where 
men love to serve their fellows. The Devil's country 
begins where men eat men. I submit the proposition that 
the overgrowth of private interests has institutionalized 
an unchristian principle, and that we must reverse the line 
of movement if we want to establish the law of Christ. 

^ See Ely, ^' Labor Movement in America"; Sumner and Haywood, Si- 
mons, " Social Forces in American History," Chapter XVII, on the early 
labor movement. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TEAGEDY OF DIVES 

A YOUNG settler and his wife are sitting at the door of 
their shack, looking off across the prairie where the heat 
lightning is playing around the horizon. It has been a long 
and grilling day, and they are too tired to talk. But they 
are content, for the crops promise fine, and inside the shack 
the baby is lying with its rosy limbs thrown out as if they 
were roots of a sturdy young pine gathering strength. 

Under the same sky far to the eastward lies a hillside 
dotted with graves. The men that filled them were young, 
strong, and dearly loved, and they died untimely deaths, 
but all about them is their native land, undivided and under 
one flag. They ought not to have died, but they did not 
die altogether in vain. 

Labor and death are our portion, but we can still sing 
our song at our work if only we know that we are spending 
ourselves freely for the folks we love and the cause we cher- 
ish, and that more abundant life will spring from the grain 
that falls in the furrow. 

It is different when the sacrifices of our life are wrested 
from us without the free consent of our love. The working 
people are kept close to the line of bare necessities. The 
margin of ease and Hberty, in which the finer joys can 
grow and blossom, is narrow and stony for many of them. 
i What might make their life freer and richer goes to others. 
Some of their higher possibilities are stunted that the gifts 
of others may unfold the better. Perhaps such a sacrifice 
) may be justified in the long range of evolution if it wins a 

291 



292 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

permanent gain for the advancement of humanity. The 
upper classes are the beneficiaries of our unequal system of 
distribution. Are they at least really benefited? Are 
they developing that higher type of humanity which will 
at the last reorganize society, conquer want, and save the 
rest? 

If we believed the teachings of Jesus, we could save our- 
selves the inquiry.^ He said that riches have so fatal an 
attraction over the mind of man that his heart is sure to 
be bound up with his wealth. As a consequence the serv- 
ice of money and the service of God are mutually exclusive, 
and a man must make his choice.^ A rich young man of 
fine character who longed for the true life was advised by 
him to dispose of his wealth in the most useful way and join 
the disciples on a footing of equality. When he could not 
wrench himself free, Jesus saw in this a confirmation of his 
belief that it is next to impossible for a rich man to enter 
the higher life.^ He was deeply moved when Zacchaeus, 
who had a Roman franchise to farm the taxes of a wealthy 
district, did cut loose and promised to make fourfold restora- 
tion of all his graft.^ The only real picture of hell in the 
whole Bible was given us by Jesus to show the fate of a 
rich man who had apparently done nothing wrong except 
to eat and dress well, and let a poor man lie sick at his gate.^ 

The greatest and most searching moral teachers of hu- 
manity have agreed with Jesus in his moral diagnosis of 
the classes that hve on unearned wealth. The demand for 
voluntary poverty which Tolstoy has repeated to our un- 
believing age is simply the heroic corollary of the moral 
condemnation of unearned riches. The pathetic flight of 
the dying Russian was the last protest against the silken 
strands with which his home had still bound him to what 

^ See '* Christianity and the Social Crisis," pp. 74-82. 

2 Matt. vi. 19-24. 3 Matt. xix. 16-24. ^ Luke xix. i-io. 

^ Luke xvi. 19-31, to be taken in connection with xvi. 1-15. 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 293 

his soul condemned. Wherever the modern novel brushes 
romantic glamour away and reports the facts, it tells us 
that the ^'best people" as a class are not good. Quite a 
Hst of novels could be made up that deal with the very prob- 
lem raised by Jesus : Can a rich man be saved ? And the 
general reply is : It can be done, but it takes an heroic cure 
to do it. Howells bankrupts Silas Lapham ; Mark Twain 
turns a Prince into a Pauper ; WilHam Allan White breaks 
the heart of a Certain Rich Man ; and Rudyard Kiphng, 
that glorifier of the strong-armed class, rolls the son of a 
railroad magnate from the deck of an Atlantic Hner and 
quarantines him on a Gloucester fishing smack among the 
Captains Courageous in order to save his poor soul. 

The man on the street nowadays is cynical enough about 
the rich, but he would not stand for the radical teachings of 
Saint Francis or Tolstoy. Nor has the Church ever backed 
the judgments of her Master except with many quahfica- 
tions. It sees too many genuine Christians among the 
rich, — fine, lovable people, clean, sober, frugal, hard- 
working, affectionate, kindly, spiritually-minded, abundant 
in good works. How can it deny them salvation? Per- 
haps the Church has long meant something different by 
salvation than Jesus did. The Church has meant getting 
to heaven ; Jesus meant Hving the right Hf e with God and 
man. He took the social view of salvation, and that ex- 
plains his doubts about the fitness of the rich to enter the 
Kingdom of God. Moreover, Jesus thought more scienti- 
fically about moral questions than most of us. The com- 
mon man looks at a given rich man and finds him a good 
fellow. Jesus looked at the moral forces inherent in wealth 
and inequality, at their assimilating power, and he feared 
for the latter end when riches had done their work. 

Many of the fine people whom we know among the rich 
have come up out of poor and simple famihes, and their 
habits of frugality and hard work are the endowment of 



294 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

their youth, a foreign importation in the Land of Money, 
Hke the sturdy health of the peasant women that come to 
us from abroad. The old-fashioned Christian character 
of some wealthy saint is so attractive just because it contra- 
dicts its surroundings, like a simple, old ambrotype in a 
jeweled frame. The family, the Church, and the school 
with their regenerate influences create Christian char- 
acters, and wealth cannot disintegrate them in one genera- 
tion. When such families educate their children and 
grandchildren in studied simplicity, and secure women of 
fine character to care for them and teach them, they are 
quarantining their loved ones with a very true instinct, and 
surrounding them with wholesome influences drawn from 
God's country. The question is whether their fight with 
the environment created by wealth will be permanently 
successful. 

In old families of established wealth, also, we meet choice 
characters, simple-minded and democratic. Some of them 
have been saved by the new democratic or socialist spirit 
that has reached them, perhaps in diluted form, and has 
filled them with a saving indignation against themselves. 
Others are simply some of God's elect, some of the beautiful 
souls we find in slum and palace and cannot explain from 
their surroundings. 

The rich are not all bad individually, and the poor are not 
all good. Ruskin sums up both with charming impartiality : 
^'In a community regulated only by laws of supply and 
demand, and protected from open violence, the persons 
who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, reso- 
lute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unim- 
aginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who 
remain poor are the entirely fooHsh, the entirely wise, the 
idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the 
imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvi- 
dent, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 295 

knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and 
godly person." ^ The question is not so much whether 
some rich men are still good, as what their riches will ulti- 
mately do with their goodness. The monks had a prov- 
erb : ^'Godliness brings forth Wealth, but the daughter 
devours the mother." 

Unearned wealth puts a man on the road to perdition by 
putting it in his power to quit work. He no longer has to 
work unless he wants to. He learns to take vacations often, 
at week ends, in midwinter to Florida, in summer to Eu- 
rope, and the cables that anchor him to work are slipped as 
his wealth becomes ample and secure. There is a decreas- 
ing nexus between his income and his personal work. As 
long as his wealth is invested in one concern, he gets behind 
it and works hard. When he has many investments, bonds, 
mortgages, stock, his work comes to consist of ^ booking 
after his investments" and deciding where to place his ac- 
cruing surplus. That is an important function, and if he 
does it poorly, he will have to go to work again. The deci- 
sion of investors in the mass is also highly important for 
the course which industry takes. But it can hardly be 
called hard and productive labor. Now the community of 
true men is a community of labor, and when a man gets 
outside of the common work of mankind, he gets outside 
of the Kingdom of God. Except in sickness, childhood, 
age, and in spells of rest and play, it is ethically bad for any 
man to be idle. Every group instinctively feels so about 
its own members and resents the person who looks on while 
the rest work. The propertied classes have always felt 
the moral turpitude of idleness when they have seen it in 
the working class, and have even passed vagrancy laws by 
which an idle man on the road can be seized and put to 
work breaking stone, or making chairs for a corporation in 
prison. But within the social group to which the rich be- 

J "Unto this Last/' p. 106. 



296 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

long this sound moral resentment against idleness does 
not apply. For a man who is rich, it is no disgrace to idle ; 
and still less for a woman. We have double weights and 
measures for the rich and poor in ethics. But God's laws 
are not so easily set aside. ^^If any will not work, neither 
let him eat.'' Somehow, somewhere, and somewhen 
he will suffer for it if he turns his back on the great com- 
munity of workers. If he will not work for God, the Devil 
will find something for his idle hands to do. And in any 
case he has shifted his work to others. If he were merely 
living on the hoarded results of his own work, he would eat 
up the hoard in the long run. He can make others work 
while he idles only because he owns what they need, — land, 
mines, machinery, something which God or humanity have 
made, but to which he holds title. 

We shall be reminded that many men of very large 
wealth toil on till they drop in their harness. These are 
usually men of big brain power who learned to work when 
young, and feel the joy of existence best when they are 
putting forth their tremendous energies to make things 
move. They are playing the game of work, and they obey 
a true physical and moral instinct in going on as if they had 
no accumulated millions. They would probably work just 
as hard if they were harnessed to the public service and got 
five thousand a year with the perquisite of honor from the 
commonwealth, as they do now while they get millions and 
little honor. Their responsibility, however, is far greater 
when they are the autocratic owners of great railway 
systems and industries. Such a weight is more than any 
man should bear, and to see these great workers breaking 
down under the strain is one of the pathetic spectacles of 
our system. They are like the axis of a driving wheel that 
is getting fragile while the wheel grows in weight and speed. 
Even for their sake we need a decentralizing of responsibility 
through industrial democracy. 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 297 

These strong men who obey the law of work are worthy 
of honor, but their position is illogical. Work is to meet 
want ; they have no want ; why should they work ? Their 
sons, who have never had their hard training for work in 
youth and who may not have the big brain power of their 
fathers, will follow the logic of facts and lapse into semi- 
idleness. In so far as the fathers go on working, they are 
illogical, but highly moral ; but in so far as they go on accu- 
mulating, they are illogical and immoral. The accumula- 
tion of wealth is justified if there is some sound human end 
in view, such as the education of a child. But when men 
make money merely to make some more money with it, the 
thing has become an obsession. Before the age of Capital- 
ism Christian ethics condemned indefinite accumulation, 
and universal judgment still regards the miser as a moral 
abnormity, in whom the property instinct has escaped 
bounds just as the sex instinct is perverted in others. 
CapitaUsm has changed our ethics and made limitless 
accumulation decent. Formerly hoarding had its natural 
limits set by the bulk of coin ; to-day millions can be stored 
in a bank vault in securities, and the physical limit to accu- 
mulation is gone. So a race of men has multiplied who are 
unlike the miser in being open-handed spenders, but like 
him in making it the end and aim of life to get money for 
its own sake. If there were only one such man in the 
country, we should study him with pity ; because there are 
many, and these the most influential men, our moral in- 
stinct has been silenced and reversed. Our business system 
has perverted the natural instincts of the strong by denying 
them a nobler outlet. A strong man loves power ; he feels 
the throb of living in exercising and gaining power. Our 
system of private ownership has disconnected the power of 
the strong from the service of the community and has con- 
centrated it on the accumulation of private wealth. So 
their hf e runs out in tragedy whether they stop working or 



298 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

go on working, and the growth of the soul to its full stature 
is denied them. 

The desire to serve our fellow-men and to feel that we 
are of use to mankind is ineradicable in human nature. 
Our economic system sets men to making profit for them- 
selves only, but their social spirit gets a vent by giving away 
their profits again after they have made them. No matter 
if vanity and the love of power tinge their philanthropy, it 
is still an index of their higher nature. Even the love of a 
mother is alloyed with the pride she takes in the pretty 
frocks of her child. But the tragedy of their lives follows 
the rich in their giving. They find themselves surrounded 
by people who are anxious to become recipients, and who 
will use every art of 'persuasion for themselves or the or- 
ganizations they represent. Unless careful investigation is 
applied, a large percentage of their gifts never accomplish 
their intention and only act as a reward to mendacity. ^'If 
they are wise, they delegate the task of dispensing their 
benefits to a brisk army of salaried officials, habitually 
underpaid, ^experts' in their several lines, who, according 
to temperament and function, develop in curious mixture 
the qualities of the saint and detective.'' ^ But by that 
intervention the human enjoyment of helping their fellow- 
men is sobered down for the rich givers. They also find 
that their contributions are apt to dry up the springs of 
benevolence in others. Why should the widow give her 
two mites to foreign missions if Dives stands ready to wipe 
out the deficit at the end of the year? Mr. J. D. Rocke- 
feller's famous method of conditional gifts was developed 
as a wise way of preventing this danger. But the farther 
a man goes in the direction of charity, the more he realizes 
the dangers attending it. If he provides three-cent meals 
for the poor, they will accept still lower wages and cut under 

1 Professor Vida D. Scudder, "Socialism and Character," p. 210. This is 
a rare book, with a feminine wealth of insight and spiritual experience. 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 299 

the self-supporting workers. If he feeds and clothes their 
children, he weakens parental responsibility. If he edu- 
cates promising young men, he helps them to climb out of 
the ranks of manual workers and to leave the working class 
without intellectual leaders. If I had to examine a class of 
social workers as to their general intelligence, I should be 
willing to rest the whole examination on one question: 
^^How would you give away a million dollars and inflict a 
minimum of damage in doing it?'' The care, intelligence, 
and conservatism of those who make it a duty to give shows 
how the problem has pressed on them. 

There is no sadder man than a disenchanted philanthro- 
pist. He has accumulated millions with the idea that some 
time he will do good with them, and then finds the good 
turning to harm. He rarely gets genuine gratitude. With 
an unerring instinct men reserve that for those who suffer 
for them. A gift out of unearned abundance has none of the 
blood of the cross on it. As the spirit of democracy spreads, 
men more and more resent the philanthropic attitude. So 
the rich man, if he is wise and has insight, will find himself 
baffied in his best impulses by the false situation in which 
he is placed. He has gathered millions in profit from the 
people, and cannot get them back to the people who need 
them. He has taken a little milk from thousands of small 
milk pails and filled a great tub ; now he tries to pour it 
back into the small pails without slopping it on the ground, 
and finds it turning unclean and sour. It ought to have 
been left in the small pails in the first place. 

Outsiders see still more elements of tragedy. As men and 
women grow rich, they get out of touch with the real needs 
of the poorer classes, and when they try to meet them, it 
is often like the Hallowe'en game in which two blindfolded 
persons try to feed each other molasses with a spoon. 
Older men think conditions are still as they were in their 
boyhood, and misjudge everything from that point of view. 



300 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The best thing millionaires could do would be to make the 
rise of further millionaires impossible, and it is too much 
to expect that of them. In the whole realm of education the 
great givers are acting as a soft pedal on the piano. There 
is probably not a teacher with a real message to our age 
who has not felt compelled by consideration for himself and 
his institution to soften and dull down the very things that 
most demand utterance. The great givers have no inten- 
tion of doing harm. They want to help. But the logic of 
a wrong relation works out that way. That is the tragedy 
of Dives. 

The immense power wielded by the rich is an intoxicant 
that few can withstand permanently. Men defer to them, 
smooth their way for them, and make them the center of 
every occasion. The morbid curiosity of the masses about 
their doings is unpleasant, but it is an expression of the 
sense of their importance. They acquire the seigniorial 
habit of mind and expect all things, including the law, to 
make room for them. The reckless driving of automobiles 
beyond the speed limit is one of the least dangerous expres- 
sions of that spirit. Such an attitude of mind is inevitable 
under such conditions ; nearly all of us would develop it ; 
but it is a distortion of the nioral sense, an hallucination of 
egotism. Christianity gave a new valuation to the quality 
of humility in ethics. Humility is the sense of dependence 
on others, the feeling that whatever we have has been 
received from God and our fellow-men, and that we find our 
true life only as serviceable members of the social organism. 
But wealth emancipates from that sense of dependence. 
Unless religion counteracts it, it displaces humihty by pride. 
But therewith the rich become unavailable for social service, 
and a danger to the society that has equipped them with 
their wealth. 

One of the simplest motives in acquiring wealth is the 
fact that wealth unlocks the house of pleasure. Up to a 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 3OI 

certain point every increase in income really brings new and 
wholesome pleasures within reach. But there is a point of 
saturation in human nature as in physics. Our stomach 
has plain limits of size, and no skyscraper construction has 
yet been devised for it. After a man has eaten a thousand 
five-course dinners they give him little more enjoyment than 
country sausage and buckwheat cakes used to do, and after 
he has acquired a liver and a waddle, they give him less. 
After a week of hard work a social function gives a thrill. 
But when life is made up of social pleasures, they become a 
round of ''social duties'' and make us tired. To a school 
teacher a trip to Europe is the hope of years and a memory 
forever ; to the leisure class it drops to the level of a sitz- 
bath or a shopping trip. The Lord has so balanced our 
nature that we get the best out of work and pleasure when 
we mix them like oxygen and nitrogen in the air. If a 
person tries to live on oxygen alone, he gets symptoms. 
Wealth tempts men and women to make a business of pleas- 
ure, and then nature makes a tragedy of them. 

Men justly desire wealth because it will give them leisure 
to cultivate their intellectual life. To most paid workers, 
physical and mental, an increase of leisure and means would 
mean a richer blossoming of the intellect. Judging by 
their opportunities, we should expect from the wealthy class 
an enormous contribution of productive intellectual work. 
Actually there is very little. The feudal aristocracy con- 
tributed few great names to art, literature, and philosophy. 
Our own great money-getters have occasionally shown the 
possession of high literary ability, but business uses them 
up. Most of them read little, and their amusement has to 
be of the most frivolous sort. In their class the culture of 
the intellectual life is confessedly passing to the women. 
After a family has taken up its residence in the land of the 
lotus-eaters, the sting of necessity is gone. Let any pro- 
ductive intellectual worker ask himself how much work he 



302 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

would have turned out in his Kfe if he had hved a Hfe of 
leisure from the outset. Unearned wealth seems to have a 
benumbing influence on the intellect, something like ade- 
noids. An operation sometimes works miracles in both 
cases. Men get out of touch with reality ; they love anti- 
quarian collections, romantic and antique art, and ritualistic 
religion. Dante makes Plutus the only one of the powers 
of the Inferno who cannot speak intelligently. 

The motive which first sets men to accumulating wealth 
is the love of their families. They want to create happy 
homes, satisfy the desires of those whom they love, and 
secure them against poverty and misfortune. The tragedy 
is that in many respects wealth in the long run will ruin 
the descendants and destroy family happiness. Though 
the founder of a fortune may go on in a simple and hard- 
working life, his women and his children and their children 
are increasingly exposed to the temptations of idleness. 
Alcoholism always flourishes in idle society. Families 
whom the Church had saved from it have drifted back into 
it, and at their dinners waiters pour champagne for young 
girls without even asking whether they want it. But 
wherever alcohol is used in mixed society, the restraints of 
sex passion are weakened. Married women flirt and live 
for conquest. No healthy mind will call the ^^fuU dress'' of 
society a modest dress. Sensational journalism has exag- 
gerated their scandals, but there is no doubt that family 
life breaks down among the idle rich. Travel separates 
husband and wife and carries each into conditions of temp- 
tation. They do not share daily labor and the care of chil- 
dren as plain married people do. Even if romantic love 
cools, the ordinary man will feel reverence when he sees 
the mother of his children caring for them. But when a 
woman has no children and does no useful work for the 
home, what ground is left for reverence ? So the family is 
poisoned by the wealth which was meant to feed it. The 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 303 

young men and women are exposed to excessive tempta- 
tions. Rich young men and poor young girls are a terrible 
combination. 

Wealth places men and women in moral danger because 
it vastly increases the number of their inferiors and de- 
creases the number of equals with whom they can associate. 
Only our equals are in position to rebuff our conceit or 
rudeness and thus make our manhood grow straight. The 
white people of the South, as no others, know what lasting 
scars it has left on their life that they have had a subject 
race under them. Condescension to inferiors passes for 
a virtue in the upper classes. Yet in the sight of Chris- 
tianity and Democracy it is a pseudo-virtue. If any man 
really desires the moral progress of the working class, he 
ought to be glad of any increase in their self-confidence and 
independence, for no virile character is possible without 
a straight backbone. Yet arbitrary power has so demoral- 
ized the upper classes everywhere that even good rich men 
regard a growing self-assertion of the working class as one 
of the most dangerous results of the spread of democracy. 
When the lower classes no longer cringe, the upper classes 
are compelled to improve their own humanity, and that is 
a painful necessity to us all. 

Wealth confers leadership. It puts a man to the front, 
gives him opportunity, throws him with able people, and 
sets off his personahty as a gilt frame sets off a picture. 
The more wealth he commands, the more people are drawn 
in the wake of his Kfe. The plays that he and his kind Kke 
are played, and the gallery must accept them or go without. 
If Dives feasts, an army of people prepare his feast, and 
their economic activities are decided for them, very often 
not for their good. He is perpetually leading in a game 
of ^^ Follow the Leader,'' and when he jumps over a stump, 
a trailing army of eager or weary people must do their best 
to jump it after him. How great, then, is his opportunity 



304 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

if he is also a man of intellectual ability and moral power, 
and determined to head toward righteousness and peace ! 

But, on the contrary, the fact seems to be that a man of 
great wealth has less chance of real leadership than a man 
of like caliber without it. If he goes into poHtics, he brings 
his party or his leader under suspicion, and his friends have 
to vouch for him that he is really not there for sinister 
motives.^ If he goes in for religion, he is suspected of hypoc- 
risy. The terrible fact is that large wealth neutralizes that 
love of the people without which all leadership is forced and 
short-lived. Marshal all the conspicuously wealthy men 
of our country in the last fifty years, and who of them was 
loved by great bodies of the people ? Whose personality 
swayed men like that of Beecher or Phillips Brooks ? 
Whose death brought a sense of personal loss like that of 
Longfellow or Mark Twain ? Who now can hold a candle 
to Bryan or La FoUette if personal loyalty and influence 
are in question ? Washington was one of the wealthiest men 
in the colonies, but what won him the abiding love of a 
nation was not his wealth, but the fact that he shared in 
the sufferings of Valley Forge, and that he refused to fasten 
a permanent grip of power on the Republic. We prefer 
not to be told that he had a large financial stake in the 
success of the Revolution. His one rival for our patriotic 
devotion, Lincoln, was a plain country lawyer. Such 
wealth as a man can earn by evident ability and pubKc 
service serves him well in gaining leadership, and nobody 
seems to grudge it. But no one has yet been able to per- 
suade the common sense of the people that the great for- 
tunes of capitalism are earned by useful ability. The peo- 
ple henceforth will believe it less and less. We recognize 
that the masterful men of wealth have done great things, 
but we see that they have mortgaged our children to their 

^ The campaign of 191 2 staged several acts in the continuous performance 
of "The Tragedy of Dives." 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 305 

children to pay for it, and we instinctively withhold our 
love. There are indeed a few rich men who have won the 
enthusiastic devotion of the people, men like Golden Rule 
Jones and Tom L. Johnson. But they won it by proclaim- 
ing their own wealth to be derived from injustice and by 
leading the people to an assault on the sources of it. Their 
civic religion began with an act of repentance and confession 
of sin, and that gave a soHd foundation of sincerity to all 
they said and did. 

The day comes for each of us when our work is done and 
we are gathered to our fathers, and a man's soul must be 
calloused indeed if he is indifferent to the verdict that his 
fellow-men will pass on him after he is gone. Our selfish 
lusts may be hot in us while they last, but when all is done, 
we want to be remembered in love for some good we have 
done, for some enduring help we have given to mankind. 
It might well break a man's heart to know that posterity 
will class him forever, not with the friends of Man who 
range about Jesus Christ as their leader, but with the op- 
pressors and exploiters of the poor. 

In so far as they have aided in the appUcation of science 
to the production of wealth and in the perfecting of indus- 
trial organization, our captains of industry have had a great 
part in the permanent achievements of our age. The names 
of some of them, who have made epoch-making advances 
in the broader organization of industry, may be cited to 
students in centuries to come as marking the climax of 
capitaHsm and the unconscious transition to a new social 
order. But in so far as rich men have been mere accumula- 
tors of unearned wealth, they need expect no praise from 
the future. There is nothing in ethics, in poUtics, or in 
economics that makes the swollen fortunes of our day de- 
sirable or admirable. The indirect good done through 
them might have been accomplished in more direct ways. 
Their evil results will gather force far into the future. The 



3o6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

deadliness of sin is never sized up in one generation. Sin 
is always pregnant with Death, but it takes time to bring 
her terrible child to birth. From now on the great problem 
of statesmanship in the capitalistic nations will be how to 
stop the further accumulation of unearned wealth; how to 
dissipate the present great fortunes without causing a revo- 
lution ; how to make way for human progress in spite of 
their obstructive influence; in short, how to undo what the 
profit makers have labored to do. Men hereafter will differ 
whether the great capitalists have done more good by their 
management or more harm by their accumulations. Be- 
fore God they will have to answer for the fact that the 
main purpose of their industrial work was not social 
achievement, but private profit. As for their descendants, 
who become passive recipients of unearned incomes, they 
will probably pass into a merciful oblivion. 

Since its advent^ democracy has been busy revising the 
verdicts of political history. The first are becoming last, 
and the last first, as Christ foretold. Kings and generals 
are being transferred from the assets of humanity to the 
debit column. Patriots are coming out of prison and ob- 
loquy, and taking their place in the hall of fame. The more 
democracy becomes an instinctive part of our mental out- 
fit, the less respect will merely selfish power get. Power 
will have to show moral qualities. The assizes of history 
will sit with Christ as the judge that charges the jury. The 
iniquities of their fathers are coming up to smite the living. 
During the debate on the Disestablishment of the Welsh 
Church in May, 1912, the Duke of Devonshire, in a political 
leaflet, charged the Liberal Party in England with ^'robbery 
of God." David Lloyd George, the . Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, repUed: ^'Doesn't he know that the very 
foundations of his fortune were laid deep in sacrilege and 
built on desecrated shrines and pillaged altars?" There 
were angry voices of protest, especially from Lord Hugh 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 307 

Cecil. Mr. George replied: ^^ These charges that we are 
robbing the Church ought not to be brought by those 
whose family tree is laden with the fruits of sacrilege at the 
Reformation. Their ancestors robbed the Catholic Church, 
the monasteries, the altars, the almshouses. They robbed 
the poor. They robbed the dead. Then when we try 
to recover some part of the pillaged property for the poor, 
their descendants accuse us of theft, — they whose hands 
are dripping with the fat of sacrifice.-' Lord Cecil denied 
that his family had profited by the robbery of church 
property, but historical proof was promptly furnished. 
This is the way in which democracy is sitting in judgment. 
^^For the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceed- 
ing small." Within the last few years there has been an 
uncovering of secrets in our country, and some men fled 
into death because they could not bear the accusing eyes 
of their fellow-men. As the new industrial democracy gets 
control of the investigating power of government, and as 
it needs the information for deahng with the problem of 
unearned wealth, many facts will be brought to Hght that 
seem safe now. That will be part of the tragedy of Dives. 
When the British democracy was wrestling with the House 
of Lords in 1910, the Lords talked of calhng on the people 
for vindication. Mr. G. K. Chesterton replied : ^ — 

"Hamlets breaking, homesteads drifting, peasants tramping, 

towns erased; 
Lo ! my Lords, we gave you England, — and you gave us back 

a waste. 
Yea, a desert, labeled ^England,' where you know (and well 

you know) 
That the village Hampdens wither and the village idiots grow. 
That the pride of grass grows mighty and the hope of man grows 

• small. 

^ London Daily News, Jan. 15, 19 10. 



3o8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Will you call on croft and village ? Let the rabbits hear your 

call. 
Would you call upon the people? Would you waken these 

things then? 
Call on God, whose name is pity; do not ask too much of men." 

The great landowners of England have found it profitable 
to diminish the number of people on the land; the great 
owners of industry have increased their number in the cities, 
but have made havoc of their quality. 

The verdict of the future is even now confronting the 
rich in their own children. The best of them are respond- 
ing to the new spirit, and are suffering under the burden of 
unearned wealth that has been laid upon them. They want 
their human birthright of doing honest work for their 
living, and of winning respect on their own merits. They 
want to feel that they are giving more than they get in Hfe, 
and that they are not living on the sweat of others. They 
are going into settlement work in order to have the sense 
of their common humanity, and they feel that they redis- 
cover their own lives when they can forget that they are 
helplessly rich. Every father passionately desires the ap- 
probation and reverence of his children. The spoiled 
children of the rich will approve of their unearned income ; 
those in whom the religious spirit of their forefathers rises 
in new form will condemn them. What kind of children 
does Dives prefer ? 

In thus presenting the moral situation of the accumula- 
tors of unearned wealth, I have not been conscious of any 
emotion of envy, class hatred, or personal grudge. I have 
only good will and friendship for every rich man and woman 
I have ever met. Some were among the finest characters 
I have known, and if I should be informed on the day of 
judgment that they all outrank me, it would only confirm 
my secret suspicions. If my argument seems severe, I am 
within my duties as a minister of Jesus Christ, pledged to 



THE TRAGEDY OF DIVES 309 

make men think as he thought and feel as he felt. This 
chapter is simply a modern exposition of his saying on the 
camel and the needle's eye. If the sermon is faulty and 
one-sided, I have seen and heard others that were worse. 
I appeal to the wise and Christian minds among the rich 
to judge if their observations among their own class and the 
history of their own spiritual temptations do not at many 
points confirm what I have tried to set forth. 

I have sought to show that my rich brothers are in a tragic 
position. In a tragedy the leading character is placed in 
a position where he struggles in vain with superior forces 
that drag him down. It may be the battle of a strong and 
guilty soul against the powers of the moral universe that 
close in on him to visit retribution. It may be the conflict 
of a righteous man with a seemingly bUnd and hostile 
fate, or with the problem of obeying two incompatible 
duties. I say in all soberness that every rich man is the 
sad hero of a tragedy, and the more noble and wise and 
righteous he is by nature, the more tragic is his fate. 

The social order as it now is places its beneficiaries in a 
position where they cannot escape wrong and unhappi- 
ness. If they obey its laws, they enrich their own life, but 
at the expense of others, and in the end their apparent ad- 
vantage turns out to be their own curse. They escape 
from the necessity of work, but in time idleness undoes 
either them or their descendants. Their wealth seems to 
promise large means of doing good, but they find their 
philanthropy a heavy burden on themselves and a ques- 
tionable blessing for others. Their money gives them 
power, but that power is an intoxicant that undermines 
their sense of human values. It piles up their pleasures, 
but the more they surfeit, the less pleasure do they feel. 
It offers them free scope for their intellectual Kfe, but it 
rusts the mainspring of their intellect. It holds out 
happiness for their families, and does its best to ruin them. 



3IO CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

It assures them of security, and makes them camp among 
enemies. It increases their sense of strength by surround- 
ing them with inferiors, and thereby relaxes their viriUty. 
It forces leadership on them, and yet chills the love of the 
people which is the condition of all leadership. It seems 
to win all the powers of this world to their side, but it puts 
them on the wrong side in the final verdict of God, of human- 
ity, and of their own souls. That is the tragedy of Dives. 
At the beginning of this chapter we raised the question, 
if perchance the privations imposed on the working class 
by our economic system could be justified on the ground 
that the privileged classes are thereby helped to a higher 
footing which in the long run will enable them to help the 
weaker to rise to the same level. If our discussion has 
come anywhere near the truth, their unearned wealth unfits 
the rich to become saviors of anybody. It even robs them 
of their own salvation. They are themselves the victims 
of our social system. If they have suffered in the tragedy 
of their lives and have grown wise through it, let them save 
others from the same fate, and help to create a social order 
where the strong will get all they earn and no more ; where 
the security of each will be guaranteed by the good will 
and help of all ; and where honor and power are not gained 
by hoarding wealth but by giving life in the service of the 
common good. ''You know that the ruling classes in a 
heathen social order lord it over the others, and their great 
men tyrannize the people. Not so is the rule of life among 
you. In your social order, whoever is ambitious for power 
let him be the helper of all, and whoever is ambitious for 
rank let him be the servant of society, just as the Son of 
Man did not come to get service but to render it, and to 
give his life as a payment to emancipate many." ^ 

^ Matt. XX. 25-28 in free rendering. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE CASE OE CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 

Let us sum up the case of Christianity against CapitaHsm. 

We saw that the distinctive characteristic of the capital- 
istic system is that the industrial outfit of society is owned 
and controlled by a limited group, while the mass of the 
industrial workers is without ownership or power over the 
system within which they work. A small group of great 
wealth and power is set over against a large group of prop- 
er tyless men. Given this hne-up, the rest follows with the 
inevitableness of a process in physics or chemistry.^ 

Wherever the capitahst class remains in unorganized and 
small units, they will struggle for the prizes held out by 
modern industry. Capitahsm in its youth threw off the 
restraints upon competition created by the older social order, 
and a fierce, free fight followed. Wherever the competitive 
principle is still in operation, it intensifies natural emulation 
by the size of the stakes it offers, enables the greedy and 
cunning to set the pace for the rest, makes men immoral 
by fear, and puts the selfish impulses in control. The 
charge of Christianity against competitive capitalism is 
that it is unfraternal, the opposite of cooperation and team- 
work.^ 

Capitalism gives the owners and managers of industry 
autocratic power over the workers. The dangers always 
inherent in the leadership of the strong are intensified by 
the fact that in capitalistic industry this power is unre- 
strained by democratic checks and fortified by almost 

1 Part III, Chapter III, of this book. 2 p^rt III, Chapter IV. 

311 



312 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

absolute ownership of the means of production and Kfe. 
Consequently the master class in large domains of industry 
have exacted excessive toil, and have paid wages that were 
neither a just return for the work done nor sufficient to sup- 
port life normally. The working class is everywhere in a 
state of unrest and embitterment. By gceat sacrifices it has 
tried to organize in order to strengthen its position. against 
these odds, but the master class has hampered or suppressed 
the organizations of labor. This line-up of two antagonistic 
classes is the historical continuation of the same line-up 
which we see in chattel slavery ahd .feudal serfdom. In 
recent years the development of corporations has added a 
new difficulty by depersonalizing the master. The whole 
situation contradicts the spirit of American institutions. 
It is the last intrenchment of the despotic principle. It 
tempts the class in power to be satisfied with a semimorality 
in their treatment of the working class. It is not Christian.^ 

The capitalist class serves society in the capacity of the 
middleman, and modern conditions make this function 
more important than ever before. But under the capital- 
istic organization this wholesome function is not under 
public control, and the relations created call out the selfish 
motives and leave the higher motives of human nature dor- 
mant. Under competition business readily drifts into the 
use of tricky methods, sells harmful or adulterated goods, 
and breaks down the moral self-restraint of the buyer. 
Under monopoly the middleman is able to practice extor- 
tion on the consumer. The kindly and friendly relations 
that abound in actual business life between the dealer and 
the consumer are due to the personal character of the parties 
and the ineradicable social nature of man, and are not 
created by the nature of business itself.^ 

In all the operations of capitalistic industry and com- 
merce the aim that controls and directs is not the purpose 

1 Part in, Chapter V. 2 part III, Chapter VI. 



THE CASE OF CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 313 

to supply human needs, but to make a profit for those who 
direct industry. This in itself is an irrational and unchris- 
tian adjustment of the social order, for it sets money up as 
the prime aim, and human life as something secondary, or 
as a means to secure money. The supremacy of Profit in 
CapitaHsm stamps it as a mammonistic organization with 
which Christianity can never be content. ^^ Profit'' com- 
monly contains considerable elements of just reward for 
able work ; it may contain nothing but that ; but where it 
is large and dissociated from hard work, it is traceable to 
some kind of monopoly privilege and power, — either the 
power to withhold part of the earnings of the workers by 
the control of the means of production, or the abihty to 
throw part of the expenses of business on the community, 
or the power to overcharge the public. In so far as profit 
is derived from these sources, it is tribute collected by power 
from the helpless, a form of legaHzed graft, and a contradic- 
tion of Christian relations.^ 

Thus our capitalistic commerce and industry lies along- 
side of the home, the school, the Church, and the democ- 
ratized State as an unregenerate part of the social order, 
not based on freedom, love, and mutual service, as they 
are, but on autocracy, antagonism of interests, and ex- 
ploitation.^ Such a verdict does not condemn the moral 
character of the men in business. On the contrary, it 
gives a remarkable value to every virtue they exhibit in 
business, for every act of honesty, justice, and kindness is 
a triumph over hostile conditions, a refusal of Christianity 
and humanity to be chilled by low temperature or scorched 
by the flame of high-pressure temptation. Our business 
life has been made endurable only by the high qualities 
of the men and women engaged in it. These personal 
quaHties have been created by the home, the school, and 

1 Part III, Chapter VII. 

2 On the regenerate sections of the social order, see Part III, Chapter II. 



314 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the Church. The State has also made Business tolerable 
by pulling a few of the teeth and shortening the tether of 
greed. Thus moral forces generated outside of Capitalism 
have invaded its domain and supplied the moral qualities 
without which it would have collapsed. But capitaHstic 
business in turn is invading the regenerate portions of the 
social order, paralyzing their activities, breaking down the 
respect for the higher values, desecrating the holy, and in- 
vading God's country.^ 

Life is holy. Respect for life is Christian. Business, 
setting Profit first, has recklessly used up the life of the 
workers, and impaired the life of the consumers whenever 
that increased profit. The life of great masses has been 
kept low by poverty, haunted by fear, and deprived of the 
joyous expression of life in play.^ 

Beauty is a manifestation of God. Capitalism is ruth- 
less of the beauty of nature if its sacrifice increases profit. 
When commerce appeals to the sense of beauty in its prod- 
ucts, beauty is a device to make profit, and becomes mere- 
tricious, untrue, and sometimes corrupts the sense of beauty. 
Neither does the distribution of wealth under capitalism 
offer the best incentives to artistic ability.^ 

Love is of God ; the home is its sanctuary. Capitalism 
is breaking down or crippling the home wherever it pre- 
vails, and poisoning society with the decaying fragments 
of what was the spring house of life. The conditions 
created by capitalism are the conditions in which pros- 
titution is multiplying. Some sections of capitalistic 
business are directly interested in vice and foster it. Be- 
cause it is so immensely profitable the white slave traffic 
would speedily become a great industry if the State did not 
repress it; and where the State tries to grapple with it, 
commercialized vice is corrupting the officers of the State.^ 

1 Part IV, Chapter I. 2 p^rt IV, Chapter 11. ^ p^rt IV, Chapter III. 

4 Part IV, Chapter IV. 



THE CASE OF CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 315 

Devotion to the common good is one of the holy and 
divine forces in human society. CapitaHsm teaches us 
to set private interest before the common good. It fol- 
lows profit, and not patriotism and pubKc spirit. If war 
is necessary to create or protect profit, it will involve na- 
tions in war, but it plays a selfish part amid the sacrifices 
imposed by war. It organizes many of the ablest men 
into powerful interests which are at some points antagonis- 
tic to the interest of the community. It has corrupted 
our legislatures, our executive officers, and our courts, 
tampered with the organs of public opinion and instruction, 
spread a spirit of timidity among the citizens, .and vin- 
dictively opposed the men who stood for the common good 
against the private interests.^ 

When men of vigorous character and intellectual ability 
obey the laws of Capitalism, and strive for the prizes it 
holds out to them, they v/in power and great wealth, but 
they are placed in an essentially false relation to their 
fellow-men, the Christian virtues of their family stock are 
undermined, their natural powers of leadership are crippled, 
and the greater their success in amassing wealth under 
capitalistic methods, the greater is the tragedy of their 
lives from a Christian point of view.^ 

These are the points in the Christian indictment of 
CapitaUsm. All these are summed up in this single chal- 
lenge, that Capitalism has generated a spirit of its own which 
is antagonistic to the spirit of Christianity; a spirit of 
hardness and cruelty that neutraHzes the Christian spirit 
of love; a spirit that sets material goods above spiritual 
possessions. To set Things above Men is the really dan- 
gerous practical materiahsm. To set Mammon before 
God is the only idolatry against which Jesus warned us. 

As Capitalism has spread over the industrial nations, 
a smoke bank of materialism has ascended from it and 

1 Part IV, Chapter V. 2 p^rt IV, Chapter VI. 



3l6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

shut the blue dome of heaven from the sight of men. All 
the spiritual forces of society have felt themselves in the 
grip of a new, invisible adversary with whom they had to 
wrestle, and whose touch made their heart like lead. 

The taste for pure literature, especially for poetry, has 
declined in the classes that once had it. A person who 
cultivates poetry as our fathers used to do must do it 
with a smile, or he will pass for a freak. In spite of the 
vast public created by the spread of education and reached 
by modern methods of pubhcity, the amount of enduring 
literature produced is slight. Authors who cannot pro- 
duce what will make a commercial profit can get no hearing. 
Authors who do produce what is commercially profit- 
able are overstimulated, rushed, and drained. Depart- 
ment- store novels and Sunday editions are drowning the 
intellect of the people in a sea of slush. They furnish the 
sensations of thinking without its efforts. Cities that 
used to have several bookstores, with dealers who knew 
and loved books, can hardly support one store now, though 
they have doubled in population. 

Our schools and colleges have felt the same subtle drag. 
In spite of the advance of educational equipment and 
method, very many educators agree that there has been 
an actual decline in the intellectual standards of the col- 
leges and in the mental grip of the students. The business 
world sneers at anything in education that does not pan 
out immediate and material results. As its blaring band- 
wagon goes by the college walls, the students quiver to 
climb on board. They have lost interest in pure thought, 
which can never be converted into cash. The old love for 
the classics is gone, and the love of science for its own sake, 
which was to take its place, has failed to become general. 
The teaching profession, which is one of the chief supports 
and feeders of the spiritual life, has declined in relative 
standing and influence. To call an idea ''academic'' kicks 



THE CASE OF CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 317 

it off the stage. A teacher has the choice between sharpen- 
ing the claws of his students for the competitive struggle, 
or seeing their interest run away from his department. 
For several college generations there has been ^^an ebb of 
generous ideals and a mounting of precocious cynicism/' 
^^If such was the impression of triumphant lawlessness 
upon young men whose horizon had been widened by 
academic culture, what must it have been upon the multi- 
tudes of callow youth that from the schoolboy desk go 
ill furnished forth into active life ? " ^ 

The learned professions are still like islands amid the 
rising tide of capitalistic profit making, but as the yellow 
flood swirls about them and eats into their banks, the mem- 
bers of each profession watch it with sinking hearts, for 
'^commercializing a profession" always means degrading 
it. Of the learned professions the Law is farthest gone. 
The most lucrative practice is the service of corporations, 
and they need the lawyer to protect their interests against 
the claims of the public. The learning, the moral inde- 
pendence, and the public standing of the profession have 
suffered as it has been commercialized. When a doctor 
urges an operation in order to get a commission from the 
surgeon who performs it, he adopts business methods, but 
if that is the spirit with which the heahng profession will 
come to look at us as we He helpless under their hands, we 
must betake ourselves to prayer. Every invasion of the 
nobler professions by the business point of view means a 
surrender of the human point of view, a relaxing of the 
sense of duty, and a willingness to betray the public — if 
it pays. When the news of the Titanic, for which half 
the world was waiting with tense faces, and for which 
thousands were gasping with breaking hearts, was held 
up by the wireless operator on the Carpaihia because his 
superior officer advised him that he could get four figures 

1 Professor E. A. Ross, "Sin and Society," p. 153. 



3l8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

for his ^^ story/' the spirit of CapitaKsm invaded wireless 
telegraphy, which had hitherto stood in the public mind for 
a chivalrous agency of social help. The operator happened 
to have a monopoly of the goods that people wanted, and 
he had sole control of the line of communication. He used 
his chance for a business deal like every other monopolist. 
Why shouldn't he ? After a short gasp of indignation, the 
world accepted the situation, and another light went out. 

All the aggregative influences in modern life, which 
organize men in social groups and compel them to think 
and act together, are means of spreading the materialistic 
spirit that is secreted by business life. Even competition, 
which seems to disunite men, creates a spiritual solidarity 
among the competitors, so that if one of them sacrifices 
mercy for profit and underpays his employees, the others 
have to follow him. If one market man gives commis- 
sions to the cooks and servants, bribery becomes the law 
of that market. But in a large way the capitalist class 
has the leadership of the whole of society. We all have 
to follow the men who hold the purse, and these are the 
men trained by capitalistic business to follow profit first 
of all. Society has always accepted the morals and man- 
ners of the ruling class and standardized the rules of con- 
duct on their pattern. The business class is to-day our 
ruKng class, and their practical code of honor and morals 
in business is becoming the code of all. 

So the materiahstic spirit of Capitalism is pervading all 
our spiritual life and conforming our conscience to its 
standards. For great social classes this has meant a pro- 
cess of demoralization. Now, no man can bear the con- 
tempt of his own soul. When the drunkard feels his shame, 
he takes a drink in order to forget and feel like a fine fellow, 
and when a man has sold himself for money, he adopts a 
philosophy of life that justifies his conduct and gives him 
back his self-respect. This becomes infinitely easier when 



THE CASE OF CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 319 

others are doing it with him. Then gray becomes the 
standard of whiteness, and sin becomes the moral law. 
So our social conditions create a social conscience to match 
them, and our social conscience evolves a philosophy of 
life to back it. There is a grim element of truth in the 
materialistic philosophy of history. If as religious men 
we fear materialism, let us beware of a social order which 
secretes materialistic ideas. When once the materialistic 
view of life has gained a hold on us all, there is no call of 
repentance to our souls and the way of regeneration is 
blocked. Dr. Jekyll remains Mr. Hyde. Pascal said 
truly, ^^More sinful than our acts are the thoughts by 
which we excuse them." 

When literature, art, education,' the learned professions, 
and all other organized expressions of the spiritual life are 
being blanketed by the materialistic spirit generated in our 
business world, how can religion and the Church escape ? 

The churches are the socialized expression of the religious 

life of men. They awaken the religious instinct in the 

young of the race, teach them spiritual conceptions of life, 

put them into historical continuity With the holy men of 

the past, hand down the socialized treasures of religion, 

the Bible, the prayers, the hymns of the Church, and give 

the people an opportunity to connect their religious im- 

1 pulses with the service of men. Presumably the religious 

instinct would live on even if the churches perished, but 

in many it would starve by neglect or relapse into barbaric 

forms if deprived of the social shelter given by the Church. 

But without some light of religion in our lives our spiritual 

nature would vegetate in an arctic night, and many of us 

would fall a prey to vice, discouragement, and moral apathy. 

Even those who do not believe in the reality of what the 

fr churches teach will acknowledge that religion has been the 

ij^most potent form of idealism among the great masses of 

I men throughout history. 



320 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The churches have to make their appeal to the spiritual 
nature of men, which is but slenderly developed even in 
the best of us, compared with the powerful instincts of 
hunger, sex, and pleasure. They are always like engines 
pulling a train on an upgrade, and they feel it if the brakes 
are set in addition. In every industrialized community 
the churches have had a hard time of it. They are weakest 
where Capitalism is strongest. If this does not suggest 
a causal connection, our mind is duller than it might be. 
Of course the decline of the churches is due to a combina- 
tion of causes. They have lost force through their own 
faults, through traditionalism, narrow ecclesiastical in- 
terests, and opposition to science and democracy. But 
to a large extent they are victims of the same influences 
which have crippled all the other noble forms of social 
life. Instead of chastising the churches, those who be- 
lieve in the spiritual values of life might inquire sympa- 
thetically why the strongest and most ancient institution 
devoted to higher ends languishes wherever industrialism 
grows. We are not so rich in fraternal and spiritual in- 
stitutions that we can afford to laugh while any of them 
die. 

In ^^Christianity and the Social Crisis"^ I explained 
how the external interests of the churches are affected by 
the economic conditions about them. They are cramped 
for space by the rise of land values; straitened in their 
income by the poverty of the wage-earning classes; de- 
prived of their volunteer workers by the exhausting toil 
of the week ; endangered in the supply and spirit of their 
ministry; loaded down with the burden of caring for a 
mass of poverty; and compelled to work on human ma- 
terial that is morally debilitated. I have seen no contradic- 
tion of the line of thought presented there. 

But beyond these external difficulties of the churches 

1 Chapter VI. 



THE CASE OF CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 321 

lies the spiritual antagonism between the genius of Chris- 
tianity and the genius of capitalistic Business. 

Religion declares the supreme value of life and personal- 
ity, even the humblest; Business negatives that declara- 
tion of faith by setting up Profit as the supreme and en- 
grossing object of thought and effort, and by sacrificing 
life to profit where necessary. 

Christianity teaches the unity and solidarity of men; 
Capitalism reduces that teaching to a harmless expression 
of sentiment by splitting society into two antagonistic 
sections, unlike in their work, their income, their pleasures, 
and their point of view. 

True Christianity wakens men to a sense of their worth, 
to love of freedom, and independence of action ; Capitalism, 
based on the principle of autocracy, resents independence, 
suppresses the attempts of the working class to gain it, and 
deadens the awakening effect that goes out from Christianity. 

The spirit of Christianity puts even men of unequal 
worth on a footing of equality by the knowledge of common 
sin and weakness, and by the faith in a common salvation ; 
Capitalism creates an immense inequality between famiHes, 
perpetuates it by property conditions, and makes it hard 
for high and low to have a realizing sense of the equality 
which their religion teaches. 

Christianity puts the obligation of love on the holiest 
basis and exerts its efforts to create fraternal feeling among 
men, and to restore it where broken; Capitalism has 
created world-wide unrest, jealousy, resentment, and bit- 
terness, which choke Christian love like weeds. 

Jesus bids us strive first for the Reign of God and the 
justice of God, because on that spiritual basis all material 
wants too will be met ; Capitalism urges us to strive first 
and last for our personal enrichment, and it formerly held 
out the hope that the selfishness of all would create the 
universal good. 



322 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Christianity makes the love of money the root of all 
evil, and demands the exclusion of the covetous and ex- 
tortioners from the Christian fellowship ; Capitalism culti- 
vates the love of money for its own sake and gives its largest 
wealth to those who use monopoly for extortion. 

Thus two spirits are wrestling for the mastery in modern 
life, the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Mammon. Each 
imposes its own law and sets up its own God. If the one 
is Christian, the other is antichristian. Many of the 
early Christians saw in the grasping, crushing hardness of 
Roman rule a spiritual force that was set against the do- 
minion of Christ and that found a religious expression in 
the cult of the genius of the Emperor. The conflict be- 
tween that brutal force and the heavenly power of salva- 
tion was portrayed in the Revelation of John under the 
image of the Beast and the Lamb. If any one thinks that 
conflict is being dupKcated in our own day, he is not far 
out of the way. 

Whoever declares that the law of Christ is impracticable 
in actual life, and has to be superseded in business by the 
laws of Capitalism, to that extent dethrones Christ and 
enthrones Mammon. When we try to keep both enthroned 
at the same time in different sections of our life, we do what 
Christ says cannot be done, and accept a double Hfe as the 
normal morality for our nation and for many individuals 
in it. Ruskin said : ^^I know no previous instance in his- 
tory of a nation's establishing a systematic disobedience 
to the first principles of its professed religion." ^ 

The most important advance in the knowledge of God 
that a modern man can make is to understand that the 
Father of Jesus Christ does not stand for the permanence 
of the capitalistic system. 

The 'most searching intensification that a man can ex- 
perience in his insight into sin and his consciousness of sin 

1 " Unto this Last," p. 88. 1 



> I 



THE CASE OF CHRISTIANITY AGAINST CAPITALISM 323 

is to comprehend the sinfulness of our economic system and 
to reaHze his own responsibihty for it. 

The largest evangelistic and missionary task of the Church 
and of the individual Christian is to awaken the nation to 
a conviction of that sinfulness and to a desire for salvation 
from it. 

The bravest act of faith and hope that a Christian can 
make is to believe and hope that such a salvation is pos- 
sible and that the law of Jesus Christ will yet prevail in 
business. 

The most comprehensive and intensive act of love in 
which we could share would be a collective action of the 
community to change the present organization of the 
economic life into a new order that would rest on the 
Christian principles of equal rights, democratic distribution 
of economic power, the supremacy of the common good, 
the law of mutual dependence and service, and the un- 
interrupted flow of good will throughout the human family. 



PART V 

THE DIRECTION OF PROGRESS 

CHAPTER I 

THE CHANNEL BUOYS 

Our argument has narrowed down, and we have arrived 
at the directly constructive part of our inquiry. 

We have traced the social awakening of our nation and 
our churches, the rising tide of moral indignation against 
the needless sufferings of our fellows and against the 
inhumanities in which we are all involved, and the new 
sense of brotherhood that is drawing us all together. In 
these stirrings of the spiritual forces of our nation we rec- 
ognized the voice of the Hving Christ, who is the soul of hu- 
manity, summoning us to complete the task of redemption.^ 

In this most modern task, which lies with a tremendous 
sense of destiny on the consciousness of all Christendom, 
we have back of us the original mission of Christianity, the 
purpose for which Jesus himself Hved and died, the unquench- 
able hope which has always, at least in broken gleams, 
Kved on in the hearts of Christian men, — the purpose and 
hope of founding on earth the Reign of God among men. 
Faith in the Kingdom of God commits us, not to an atti- 
tude of patient resignation, nor to a policy of tinkering and 
palliatives, but to a revolutionary mission, constructive 
in purpose but fearless in spirit, and lasting till organized 
wrong has ceased.^ 

1 Part I of this book. 2 p^rt II of this book. 

324 



THE CHANNEL BUOYS 325 

In the consciousness of this mission we then analyzed 
our present social order. We found that large portions of 
it have been so deeply affected by the spirit of Christianity 
that they have become fortifications of liberty and agencies 
to express good will toward all and to secure the common 
good. On the other hand, we found that the economic 
organization of society, while affected by Christian motives 
through personal channels, has not yet been christianized 
in its fundamental relations and methods, and that this 
is the cause of our misery and the source of the evil influ- 
ences which are paralyzing 'and contaminating the regener- 
ate parts of our social life.^ 

It remains now to inquire how a Christian economic 
order should be constituted, and by what methods our 
present order can be changed into one that will be Chris- 
tian in its very constitution. ^^ There is an order for human 
affairs which is the best. That order is necessarily not the 
one which now exists. If it were, why should we wish to 
change the present? But it is the order which ought to 
exist in order to produce the greatest possible welfare of 
mankind. God knows it and wills it. It is for man to 
discover and establish it.'' ^ 

I can imagine the sad smile on the lips of the wise as they 
watch one more bark hoisting purple sails and laying its 
course for Utopia. 

"A thousand creeds and battle cries, 
A thousand warring social schemes, 
A thousand new moralities. 
And twenty thousand thousand dreams.'' ^ 

Let them smile. I would rather meet God in a dream than 
not meet him at all. I would rather join in the Exodus and 

1 Parts III and IV of this book. 

2 The closing words of the great book, ''De la propriete et de ses formes 
primitives," by the eminent Belgian economist Emile de Laveleye. 

^ Alfred Noyes. 



326 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

lay my bones to bleach on the way to the Promised Land 
than to make bricks for Pharaoh forever, even if I could 
become an overseer over other slaves and get big spoonfuls 
from the garlicked fieshpots of Egypt. But I have no 
intention of furnishing blue prints of the castles we shall 
build in Utopia, or of predicting the course of human events. 
There is only one thing which I am prepared to assert 
with absolute confidence about coming events : that they 
will not happen in the way I expect them to happen. The 
forces working together in the mass of human life are so 
numerous, so intricate, so mysterious, that it baffles us to 
explain historical events after they are all over; and fore- 
telling them is slightly more difficult. But I do beheve 
that it is not beyond the moral intelligence of man to get 
a fairly correct conception of the direction in which we 
ought to move, so that we may guide our practical deci- 
sions by our larger outlook. 

We have a divine instinct for righteousness within us that 
acts as a guide. Like a compass needle, it is always quiver- 
ing and shifting, always liable to deflections and aberra- 
tions that have led many a bold captain on the rocks. But 
it answers mysteriously to the cosmic will of God, and we 
disregard it at our peril. Many have been ruined by follow- 
ing its lead without scientific intelligence ; but more by far 
have been beached on the mud flats by nailing a gilded 
stick to the bow and steering by that. 

We also have the channel buoys to guide us which have 
been anchored by the historical experience of mankind. 
They too may be misleading, for the channel is always 
shifting, and the anchoring of the buoys has been badly done. 
History has always been written from the point of view of 
the dominant classes and edited to suit their needs. It has 
told all about kings and priests, and left the common people 
under the gravecloth of oblivion. It has erected monu- 
ments to the great destroyers of mankind, and stamped out 



THE CHANNEL BUOYS 327 

the memory of the true leaders of the people whose wisdom 
might now offer us real guidance. Since the rise of democ- 
racy in the French Revolution the science of history has 
begun to speak a new language, and all the records are now 
being reread from new points of view. If that intellectual 
work were farther advanced, we could move with incom- 
parably surer insight. History ought to serve us as the 
great experiment station of mankind, and even now we 
can get a clear verdict, for instance, on the question, if it 
is wise for a nation to have the bulk of its property owned 
by a small and irresponsible class. 

For those of us who believe in Jesus Christ, there is still 
another sure means of guidance into the future. If the 
fundamental direction of his mind and his life was a reve- 
lation of the will of God for humanity, then he is to us a 
summons to go forward in the line marked out by him, and 
also a guarantee that we have the Almighty and his moral 
imiverse behind us as we move. 

Whenever Jesus looked at any man singly, he saw and 
felt his divine worth ; not on account of anything the man 
owned and knew, but on account of his humanity. The 
child, the cripple, the harlot, were to him something pre- 
cious and holy, and he stood at bay over them when any one 
tried to trample on them in the name of property, respect- 
abihty, or religion. He was always moving to break down 
the power of sin in the individual and of wrong in society, 
which corrupted or crushed this divine worth, and to 
furnish a faith, a spirit, a motive, and a human environ- 
ment in which the Hfe of man could unfold in freedom and 
strength. 

Whenever Jesus looked at men collectively, he saw and 
felt their unity and brotherhood. To him sin consists in 
that which divides, in war and hate, in pride and Hes, in 
injustice and greed. Salvation consists in drawing to- 
gether in love, as children of one Father. If any member of 



328 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the human family is weak or perishing, it concerns all. 
The solidarity of mankind was the great conviction under- 
neath all his teachings. 

These fundamental utterances of the mind of Christ 
are the supreme law of Christendom. Anything that 
contradicts them is anarchic. The chief business of Chris- 
tian men to-day is to translate them into terms large enough 
to make them fully applicable to modern social life. Our 
economic organization will have to be transformed in these 
directions. It is unchristian as long as Men are made in- 
ferior to Things, and are drained and used up to make 
profit. It will be Christian when all industry is consciously 
organized to give to all the maximum opportunity of a 
strong and normal life. It is unchristian when it systema- 
tizes antagonism, inequality, tyranny, and exploitation. It 
will be Christian when it is organized to furnish the material 
foundation for love and solidarity by knitting men together 
through common aims and united work, by making their 
relations just and free, and by making the material welfare 
of each dependent on the efficiency, moral vigor, and good 
will of all. 

In the following chapters I shall attempt to make the 
application of these fundamental demands of the Christian 
mind to the transformation of the economic organization 
of industrial society. In order to head off some of the 
misunderstandings into which men seem almost eager to 
shde in matters of this kind, I* want to disavow formally 
any idea that we are to sit down and create a new set of 
social institutions out of our heads. Social institutions 
are the slow growth of centuries ; they will not rise ready- 
made from the ground when we stamp our foot. Even 
religion is- not powerful enough to make a break in the 
continuity of history. All that we can do is to take our 
social relations and institutions as we find them, and mold 
them whenever we find them at all plastic. In a previous 



I I 



THE CHANNEL BUOYS 329 

chapter ^ I tried to show by what varied influences and how 
gradually the Family, the Church, the School, and the 
State have been christianized. I conceive of the chris- 
tianizing of Business as a similar process. Ethics and 
rehgion will exert their most valuable influence when they 
can get behind the great material forces which are constantly 
changing the social order, and cooperate with them. Our 
economic organization cannot be run into the repair shop 
to be made over. We should all be dead by the time it 
came out painted and varnished. Whatever ^.appens, we 
want three meals a day, and our economic system must 
feed us. Any reorganizing process in the social order can 
only be like the minute cellular changes that transform a 
tadpole into a frog, or that heal over a wound in our own 
body. 

When a noveHst tells a tale thai happened in our own 
world, our memory and imagination combine to supply the 
moving background for the story and the hum of Hfe. On 
the other hand, in sketches of Utopia, like Bellamy's ^^ Look- 
ing Backward," society seems thin, artificial, and monot- 
onous, like a mechanical toy, and we get the impression 
that we are to trade off our own rich world for this papier- 
mache affair. I disavow any notion that all the world 
henceforth is to be made after one ready-made pattern and 
labeled ^Xhristian.'' All the civilized nations for more 
than a century have been unanimously moving in the 
direction of democracy, but how much uniformity and 
monotony is there to-day in the political institutions of 
republican France and Switzerland, of New Zealand and 
Canada, of Oregon and Massachusetts? There is unity 
of movement, and yet endless diversity of life. The most 
monotonous thing in the modern world is the steam-roller 
progress of Qipitalism, which creates the same conditions 
in Argentina, Bombay, and St. Petersburg. But even 

1 Part III, Chapter II. 



330 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Capitalism wears a different face in New York and Berlin, 
If, therefore, under some pentecostal inspiration all the 
world should begin to move toward the ideal of a Christian 
social order, every community would realize it in a different 
way. Nor would it be stationary anywhere. It would 
constantly have to meet new needs incident to growth, 
and would always be in danger of slipping back into new 
forms of tyranny and exploitation. Life will always be a 
strenuous and breathless game, playing tag among the 
teeth of Death. Yet we can move toward a Christian 
social order and get there. 

Another Hvely misunderstanding will have to be scotched 
before we can proceed. The word ^^ Christian" is so con- 
nected with the idea of self-sacrificing service that men get 
the impression that a Christian social order would have no 
room for the selfish int^?^-ests. They justly conclude that 
such a contrivance would be too good to be good for any- 
thing. I hold with Edmund Burke that ^^ the human system 
which is founded on the heroic virtues is doomed to failure 
and even corruption." I believe that there is incomparably 
more capacity for devotion to the common good in human 
nature than is now being brought out, and that, a chris- 
tianized social order would tap artesian wells of it. But 
unless the ideal social order can supply men with food, 
warmth, and comfort more efficiently than our present 
economic order, back we shall go to Capitalism. Chris- 
tianity will have to validate its claims by productive effi- 
ciency. In his contest against the priests of Baal on Mount 
Carmel, EHjah proposed the test : '^The God that answereth 
by fire, let him be God." Charles H. Spurgeon christianized 
the test: ''The God that answereth by orphanages, let 
him be God." In our present conflict between God and 
Mammon we shall finally have to socialize it: ''The God 
that answereth by low food prices, let him be God." 

In the chapters that now follow I shall simply trace 



THE CHANNEL BUOYS 33 1 

those fundamental lines of social evolution along which 
society must move in order to leave inhumanity behind 
and to emerge in a social order that will recognize the worth 
of manhood and the solidarity of mankind. We really 
all know what these lines are, but a conscious formulation 
of them is mightily needed. The planlessness of our 
political and religious leaders is pitiable. Most of them 
have taken the advice of Jesus literally and are taking no 
thought for the morrow. Society would be drifting and 
yawing like a ship with a drunken crew, unless an invisible 
hand at the helm were steering us by means of our blind, 
primal impulses. In the prescientific age men lived in 
that fashion with Nature, taking her blessings and her 
blows as they came, and cooperating with her in a feeble 
and half-comprehending way. Science has given us direc- 
tive powers, and we can now make Nature make us. As 
we are comprehending the great laws of social life, the time 
for large directive action is coming, and we shall make 
Society make its members. My appeal is to Christian 
men to use the prophetic foresight and moral determination 
which their Christian discipleship ought to give them in 
order to speed and direct this process. If any one thinks it 
cannot be done, let the unbeliever stand aside and give 
place to those who have faith. This thing is destiny. God 
wills it. What is morally necessary, must be possible. 
Else where is God ? 



CHAPTER II 

JUSTICE 

The simplest and most fundamental quality needed in 
the moral relations of men is justice. We can gauge the 
ethical importance of justice by the sense of outrage with 
which we instinctively react against injustice. If redress 
is denied us, we feel the foundations of the moral universe 
totter. Men have often gone to law and used up all their 
hard-earned property to satisfy their craving for justice, 
and if they thought it was permanently denied them, their 
whole nature has become hard and bitter. Until injustice 
between individuals is made right by restoration or for- 
giveness, fraternity between them is cleft, and only heroic 
love on the part of the wronged can bridge the gap. For 
a man who has overreached or wronged his neighbor, to 
offer him favors or chatty is felt to add insult to injury. 
If he loves him, let him love him enough to be just to him. 

So fundamental is justice between man and man. One 
of the prime requisites of a righteous social order, there- 
"^re, is to provide wise and prompt social tribunals to settle 
casea where private justice is in dispute. That the courts 
in our country have become slow, cumbersome, and in- 
efficient, and that in some cases justice is defeated because 
the Law is trippea by its own wool, is notorious and 
confessed. For a wo* kingman suing against a corporation, 
dilatoriness in the courts is almost equivalent to a denial 
of justice. The moral injury which this condition inflicts 
by stunting the love of justice and by breaking down the 
confidence of the plain man in the righteousness of society, 

332 



JUSTICE 333 

IS beyond calculation. The legal profession is formally 
intrusted by society with the maintenance of justice. 
Lawyers alone have the technical knowledge necessary to 
remedy the existing evils. The fact that they have allowed 
them to grow up, and that many of them are apparently 
hardly aware that things might be bettered, lies as guilt 
at the door of the entire great profession, just as any col- 
lapse in the work of the Church is brought home to minis- 
ters and priests. 

As justice is the condition of good will between indi- 
viduals, so it is the foundation of the social order. Any 
deep-seated injustice throws the foundation walls out of 
plumb. If one class is manifestly exploiting another, 
there is no fraternity between them. Long-standing op- 
pression has sometimes so dulled the manhood of a peas- 
ant class that they accepted injustice as part of the inevi- 
table suffering of life, and received any act of justice from 
the aristocracy with enthusiasm as a noble and generous 
deed. Such patience is really the most pathetic symptom 
of degradation. But the fact that the oppressing classes 
have always vigilantly suppressed any social or religious 
agitation that might waken the drugged sense of justice, 
shows that such peace is always superficial. If any one can 
read history without a sickening sense of the enormous 
extent -of injustice and oppression in all nations, he has a 
mental make-up which I both envy and abhor. Practi- 
cally all the internal upheavals recorded in history were 
caused by the agonized attempts of inferior classes to re- 
sist or shake off the clutch of injustice. Nations die of 
legalized injustice. It is more deadly even than sexual 
vice or alcoholism. 

When injustice becomes widespread and permanent, 
I it undoes the Christian character of the social order, be- 
cause it makes human solidarity impossible between the 
two classes concerned, and because it deprives both of them 



334 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of their full Christian manhood. The class that profits 
by injustice becomes parasitic. All plant and animal life 
shows that parasites may be brilliant in coloring, but they 
are always defective in the essentials of life. On the other 
hand, the people of the exploited class are deprived of an 
equal opportunity to develop their gifts. Something of 
the divine life in them is suppressed. 

Revolutions furnish a curious proof of the extent to 
which ability is suppressed under conditions of injustice. 
A revolution is a time of lawlessness and of destruction of 
life and property, which ought by rights to cripple a people 
for many years. But every successful revolution unhorses 
privilege and flings open the door of opportunity to some 
new class that has hitherto been shut out, and this has 
sometimes set free such an opulence of intellectual ability 
and moral power that all the damage and disorder of a 
revolution were cheap. The French Revolution loosed 
an avalanche of ability and force over Europe. The Puri- 
tan Revolution brought out the men of the Long Parlia- 
ment, Eliot, Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell — the ablest 
ruler England has ever had. When Cromwell organized 
the Ironsides, he disregarded the tradition which restricted 
captaincies to men of noble birth, and that democratized 
army made a new record in the history of fighting. The 
political ability of the plain people of England had been 
shut out of the parliaments; in the Parliamentary Army 
they found a social organization and a forum, and that army 
launched schemes of political, social, and religious reforms 
which England has been carrying into effect ever since. 
The great migration of the Teutonic nations in the fourth 
and fifth centuries was a terrible landslide of semibar- 
barous people that buried civilization, overthrew the gov- 
ernments, and plundered the cities. We should expect 
only misery and destitution to follow such a first-class 
disaster. Yet the fact is that when the German Franks 



JUSTICE 335 

conquered the Roman province of Gaul/ destitution dimin- 
ished, the impoverished cities began to flourish, and the 
condition of the lower classes passed through an unparalleled 
improvement. The reason is that the destructive influ- 
ence of the, invasion was offset by an increase in justice. 
The Roman law had permitted the rich to monopolize 
the land and to enslave the working class. Gaul was full 
of huge estates with prison pens of slaves to work them. 
The Germans had a far milder form of servitude ; they 
allowed the serf to hve on his bit of land in return for a 
moderate rent and service. Their coming spread the slave 
population over the land and gave the poor man a chance, 
with the results aforesaid. How great, then, is the damage 
which injustice inflicts, if even a violent and destructive 
abolition of it can be a blessing ? 

Theoretically we have no special privilege in America. 
Our country was ^^ dedicated to the proposition that all 
men are created free and equal.'' It is our boast that 
America spells opportunity. The belief in equal rights 
is so dear to us that when any special privilege is to be 
granted, it has to masquerade as an act for the pubKc wel- 
fare. No party dared to support a high protective tariff 
on the plain ground that certain interests ought to be re- 
lieved from competition and enabled to make easier profits. 
But in reaHty our life is yeasty with special privilege. 
Whence have these huge fortunes grown in a single genera- 
tion, if not from privilege? ^^By their fruits ye shall 
know them." Do we pick the pumpkins of millionaires 
from the grape vine of equality? In what do we differ 
from other countries when we foot up the result? Our 
aristocracy has no titles. But what's in a name? It is 
power that counts. Their wealth is not founded on solid 
square miles of agricultural land, like that of the nobiHty 
which grew up in an agricultural age. It is far-flung and 

^ The present France. 



336 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

scattered, based on mines, railways, factories, building 
sites; but it involves rights to levy tribute which would 
have turned the Norman barons pale with envy. 

Injustice is the obverse side of privilege. If one man has 
unearned wealth, others will have less than, they have 
earned. It is a simple proposition in physics ; money can- 
not be in two pockets at the same time. If any one wants 
to promote righteousness, let him put a stop to privilege ; 
and if he wants to locate privilege, let him look for easy 
money. ^^ In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," is 
the law for all the sons of Adam. If a man does not eat 
his bread in the sweat of his brow, he is probably eating it 
in the sweat of other people's brows. If we see wealth 
bubbling up under a man's hands, broadening into a stream, 
and shooting up in a fountain, the community is justified 
in asking where it comes from. If he claims that he has a 
miraculous power to make money flow from the rocks, his 
claim deserves investigation, but meanwhile we ought to 
go on the assumption that he has tapped a public main, 
probably unknown to himself. 

If any one wants to increase his social insight, it would 
pay him to study the historical processes by which special 
privilege has been built up. In olden times it was often 
by bold, rude seizure, as when some English lord fenced 
in the common land and called it his own, or when an Irish 
chieftain claimed as his personal property the lands of the 
clan to which he held title as the head of the commune. 
We still have downright theft enough in our day, as the 
looting of the public lands in the West and the franchise 
grabs of our cities can testify. But usually the appropria- 
tion or increase of privilege is done by encroachments so 
quiet and automatic that even the beneficiaries are not 
aware that they are crowding any man from his property 
or tapping his earnings ; they merely feel that things are 
coming their way and that they cam afford to buy that 



? 



JUSTICE 337 

limousine. And those who are suffering injustice are unable 
to discover how their labor is drained away ; they merely 
know that after all their pumping the pail is only half full. 

The fundamental step toward christianizing the social 
order, therefore, is the establishment of social justice by 
the abolition of unjust privilege. Logically this would be 
the first step; ethically it is the most important step; 
practically it is usually the last and hardest. 

I have merely undertaken to point out the direction in 
which the christianizing process should move. It is not 
my business to locate and enumerate the forms of privilege 
in modern life. It would take a book. But lest any one 
should complain that I am leaving the matter up in the 
air, I will stake it down. The private ownership of land, 
of mineral treasures, of water power, etc., is just, only if the 
holder of such an exclusive privilege pays the full rental 
value for the opportunity granted to him by the community, 
which is, under God, the only real owner. If no adequate 
compensation is paid to the community, an injustice is 
committed, and this injustice grows as the population grows 
denser and the need for these natural opportunities grows 
greater. The private appropriation of the unearned in- 
crement of the land is the giant sequoia among the rich 
vegetation of injustice. The control of the means of traffic 
and intercourse also offers an opportunity for injustice in 
this age of traffic. Those who control them are exercising 
attributes of sovereignty, and if they use their power to 
levy tribute beyond a due reward for their services, they 
are unjust to those who have granted them their power. 
Those who control inventions and processes necessary to 
modern industry by means of patent rights are likewise 
in a position to levy tribute, and may take from society 
far more than a just return for the labor and service they 
contribute to the life of society. These are the three chief 
sources of monopoly profit to individuals, and of injustice 



338 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

to the public : the private property in land which makes 
it possible to tax the propagation of life ; the private con- 
trol of the means of traffic which makes it possible to tax 
social intercourse ; and the private monopoly of inventions 
which makes it possible to tax the progress of civilization. 
The first injustice can be eliminated by appropriating the 
unearned increment of the land through adequate taxation 
of land values ; the second by the public ownership of the 
means of traffic, or — which is more difficult — by hold- 
ing corporations down to a fair income ; the third by re- 
warding inventors by public grants or a royalty system. In 
addition to these old and legalized forms of privilege, a mod- 
ern form has grown up which gets its power from size and 
combination. Industrial corporations are able to fix prices 
for the public through the immensity of their resources; 
employers are able to fix the wages of workmen through the 
costliness of the productive plant and the impossibiUty of 
applying labor without machinery. 

In one of the azure halls of heaven is the council chamber 
in which the Senate of the Immortals meets. Only the 
wisest of all ages have a seat there : Moses and Isaiah, 
Solon and Aristotle, King Arthur, Dante, and their spiritual 
peers. Equipped with the experience of their own nations, 
enriched by communion with men of all times, unbiased 
by selfish passions, uninfluenced by party interests, they 
sit to consider the course of human events. 

To them entered one day that vivacious and versatile 
Personality who once came with the Sons of God and dis- 
cussed the case of Job with Jehovah.^ He had again come 
'^from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking 
up and down in it," and he now reported that Columbus 
had just discovered America. 

Immediately there rose before the prophetic minds of 
the great Immortals the sight of broadening streams of 

1 Job i. ^ 



JUSTICE 339 

human life pouring from the old world into the new, of 
communities colonizing the seaboard, pushing up the river 
valleys, clustering around the waterfalls, dotting the plains 
with homes, and building up commonwealths and nations. 
A great hope swept audibly through the Senate like the 
rushing of a mighty wind. In that new continent the best 
in humanity would find a free course ; no inherited tyran- 
nies seeking to perpetuate themselves, no embittering mem- 
ories of bloody wars, no classes and castes cemented with 
injustice to baffle brotherhood and defy the liberty of States. 
Swiftly they began to plan a great Charter of Rights and 
Liberties that would forever bar out from the new land the 
forces which had ruined the older peoples. 

Satan hstened with an amiable smile. ^'Excuse me, 
gentlemen, but let us get down to common sense. We've 
got this all fixed. You forget that the people who occupy 
this country will need labor force. We'll let them use up 
the Indians, provided they can make 'em work. After 
that we'll tap the reserve force of Africa and put the black 
race at their service. You know that the venerable institu- 
tion of slavery has been indispensable in the advancement 
of civilization. By restricting it to the colored races, we 
shall save the whites from the slight hardships which nat- 
urally accompany it." (The Senate moved uneasily.) 
^'Then we've got to offer incentives to thrift and enterprise. 
We're going to introduce the system of private property 
in land which worked such remarkable results in the Ro- 
man Empire." (A shudder ran through the assembly.) 
^^ Those who first seize an opportunity can keep it and work 
it. That will promote industry and progress." 

''But the land must not be sold in perpetuity," broke 
in the venerable figure of Moses. ''Jehovah forbade it.^ 
All must have a share in God's land. What shall they do 
who come after?" 

^ Leviticus xxv. 23-38. 



340 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

"They'll have to make the best terms they can with the 
fellows on the inside. Every man for himself, and I'm 
always ready to take the hindmost, you know/' and he 
winked at King Arthur, who gripped his staff with brawny 
fist, as if he would right willingly use it. 

"As the population increases, it will be necessary for 
the sake of efficiency to consolidate the resources of the 
nation. The ablest men will come to hold all the important 
property rights and the lines of traffic. In four hundred 
years, say about 1892, they ought to have a pretty solid 
system. They can fix prices as they need them, and in that 
way they will have ample funds to finance the development 
of mankind and put society on a stable basis." 

"Woe unto them that join house to house,. that lay field 
to field," exclaimed Isaiah, lifting his hands. "What 
mean ye, that ye crush my people and grind the face of the 
poor?" 

"This is death to the liberties of the people," cried 
Aristotle. " This is the very calamity from which every 
patriot of Greece sought to save his commonwealth. It was 
in vain. Greece became a desert." Solon covered his 
face. 

They sat in silence, and darkness seemed to shroud the 
chamber. One of the attendant angels was reminded of 
the gloom that settled over heaven when word was brought 
of the fall of man. Even from the lips of Satan the smile 
vanished, and he passed out. 



CHAPTER III 

PROPERTY AND A JOB AS MEANS OF GRACE 

Perhaps some reader, too sleepy or too sharp to under- 
stand my meaning, has gathered from the preceding chapter 
j that I behttle the value of property and want everybody to 
live in a state of holy impecuniosity. On the contrary, I 
i affirm that property is a means of grace and that none can 
I experience a full salvation without it. When Jesus was 
■ 'charged with destroying the law and the prophets by his 
j revolutionary teaching, he said, ^^I came not to destroy the 
Law, but to fulfill." In the same spirit I wish to vindicate 
the sacred right to property. A condition in which millions 
I of people have no share at all in the productive capital of 
the nation, and hardly enough even of furniture, clothing, 
and food to cover their nakedness and nourish their bodies, 
debases humanity, undermines the repubhc, and desic- 
cates reHgion. All the sweetest and holiest elements in 
life lean back on property for support. The dear memories 
that comfort us in loneliness and age cling about the 
pictures, the books, the trinkets that have come down the 
years with us and are now clothed in an aureole of love. 
The home has the respect of its inmates only if it contains 
some property that ministers to their comforts and pleas- 
ures. What ought to be the restful afternoon of Hfe 
becomes a haunting specter if there is no property to support 
our failing strength. The philosopher Hegel was right: 
'^^ Every man must have property." Schiller echoes it: — 

"Etwas muss er sein eigen nennen, 
Oder der Mensch wird morden und brennen." 

341 



342 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Under the normal conditions of American life in the past, 
it was possible for the average man to support his family, 
raise his children, and still save something for a rainy day. 
Older men, who judge the present by their own past, feel 
that it must be so still and are inclined to regard a work- 
ingman as shiftless if he has no money in the bank. In 
fact, it is still so for great numbers, as our savings banks 
and insurance companies can testify. The brave, the wise, 
and the religious families succeed almost miraculously in 
educating their children and having a margin left on which 
to trust the Lord. But where Capitalism has broken down 
the defenses of the working class and forced the standard 
of income down to the line of bare support, it may be the 
part of larger wisdom for parents not to lay by money while 
they are raising children, but to use up their income to 
give the children the food and environment they need for 
their physical development. That is their best form of 
investment. But it submerges the parents in poverty dur- 
ing their vigorous years, and after their children are grown 
up, their own working force has declined, and their income 
is apt to become slender. If they do save, the accumulation 
of years is often swept away by a single illness or death in 
the family. I have often seen with what pitiful tenacity 
old people cling to the last $ioo or $50 in their savings 
bank book because it may pay for their admission to a 
Home, or at least give them a decent burial. Before the 
pension system was introduced in England, a great propor- 
tion of frugal and hard-working people had to ^^go on the 
parish" in age. 

But even if a workingman and his wife have $2000 in the 
bank and a home of their own, that does not equip them 
with property in the full sense of the word. It does in- 
crease their income, save them rent, and give them security, 
but it does not aid them in the act of production. The 
old-fashioned village mechanic could have taken the $2000, 



PROPERTY AND A JOB AS MEANS OF GRACE 343 

equipped a shop of his own, and become his own b.oss. He 
would have turned his Uttle property into hve capital and 
if he was capable, could hoist his future higher with that 
block and tackle. In the same way, the average farmer 
has himself plus his farm, and the two make a strong com- 
bination. The modern industrial workman has only him- 
self. The machinery with which he works is too expensive 
for him to own. If he has property, it is divorced from his 
work. It is not '^capital." In point of fact, the industry 
of our country is very largely financed by the savings of the 
plain people. The banks and insurance companies collect 
them, and thence they flow into the channels of business. 
But therewith the money passes out of the control of the 
owners. What a man deposits to-day may be used next 
week to pay Pinkertons who will do things he abominates. 
It may even help to buy a new machine in his own factory, 
at which he will work, yet aside from the interest he gets 
on the deposit, his money will not aid him in earning a Hve- 
lihood. 

This is an anomalous condition, and those who believe 
in the sacredness of property would do well to consider it. 
Modern industry has multipHed the amount produced by 
the worker, but gives him little chance to save for age, and 
next to no chance to use his savings as a leverage in pro- 
duction. The very bigness of modern industry defeats 
'him and reduces him to economic powerlessness. 

My proposition is that the workingman needs property 
more than ever, but that^under modern conditions property 
must take new forms. Under the simple conditions of 
family production in the past, property took the form of a 
small hoard belonging to one family jointly. Under the 
compKcated conditions of social production to-day, property 
must consist in a share of and a right in a collective accumu- 
lation which belongs to a larger group jointly. I shall try to 
explain my meaning by an example that comes home to all. 



344 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

A French writer says : ^^ To-day the child of a poor man 
falls to the ground naked, as if it were born in a savage 
state. It has no connections; it has no ancestry."^ 
The spirit of that statement is fine, but the assertion runs 
far beyond the facts. Even the child of a poor man in a 
civilized community is a large property owner. He is 
part owner of a great network of streets, and when his 
baby carriage goes by, all concede his right of way and 
allow him to enjoy an amazing panorama of wonders in 
peace. There are great parks, with shade trees and lawns, 
with swings and see saws, with lakes and swans, and 
possibly with a zoo of monkeys and elephants, to which he 
has access — provided his folks can spare the time to take 
him there. In some cities skilled hands are working to ' 
eliminate microbes from his milk bottle. If he gets seri- 
ously sick, great institutions are open to receive him, — 
if they are not too full. When he begins to trudge about, 
the Kindergarten, once the privilege of the rich, teaches 
him games, songs, and stories. For years he has free use 
of a most expensive apparatus of schoolrooms and teachers. 
If he loses his way, an army of blue-coated giants hunt for 
him, wipe his nose, and take him home to his mother. If 
he has played with matches, another set of giants swarm up 
ladders and risk their lives to save him from his own 
naughtiness. And all this is not charity. It is his right. 
He is part owner of a great corporation. Its servants are 
his servants; its resources are his when he needs them. 
All this is property, and safer property than anything he 
will ever own. He may save ten years to buy a home of 
his own, and lose all his accumulation by mortgage fore- 
closure. But no one can foreclose on the property he holds 
in common with his fellow citizens. This property right 
is not the right of exclusive possession, but the right to 
use collective property whenever he has need of it. 

• ^ F. Huet, *'Le regne social du christianisme.'^ 1 



PROPERTY AND A JOB AS MEANS OF GRACE 345 

When the child grows up, he will find that he has other 
property rights, which give him free access to pubUc baths, 
Hbraries, lectures, and concerts. Public servants remove 
the ashes and garbage of his home without extra charge. 
If he is ^^down and out," the park bench will be his last 
resort for rest and reflection, and when he is old, he has a 
vested right to be supported at public expense in the poor- 
house. This is not much compared with the similar rights 
of a citizen of Athens under Pericles, but it is better than 
nothing. Thus even now we all have rights in large collec- 
tive properties, which supplement our exclusive and private 
possessions. This collective form of property admits of 
indefinite enlargement. It ought never to supersede the 
' private form of property entirely, but it may well come to 
exceed it in value and importance. 

This form of property is the truly modern form. A 
capitalist who holds stock in a railway, a gas company, and 
a factory cannot lay his hand on a single rail, pipe, or brick 
and say, ^^This is mine," as the farmer can say about his 
cow and his barn ; in every case he is part owner of collec- 
tive wealth, and this property right has a broader and 
securer basis than if he owned one fractional part com- 
pletely. The system of insurance which has grown to 
such immense proportions in modern life is essentially 
a cooperative organization, with collective capital, which 
assures to every poKcyholder a contingent property right. 
If a man insures his house against fire, he has not bought 
tangible property, but he has bought a right. If he is 
never in a case to need assistance, he will never get a cent 
of returns for his insurance premiums ; but in case of a fire 
his latent property right springs into active life and saves 
him from poverty. For the average man, which is the 
wiser way of providing for the contingency of disaster, to 
set aside a small hoard of his own to be used in case of fire 
or to hold an insurance policy and pay premiums on it ? 



346 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Which would be the wiser way to provide for the con- 
tingency of protracted sickness or old age^ to save several 
thousand dollars, or to earn the right to sick benefits and 
an old age pension? The system of small family hoards 
went with the system of family production ; the system of 
insurance and pension will have to be developed to go with 
the modern system of social production as its corollary. 

Several European nations have struck out boldly in this 
direction in order to end the intolerable poverty of the 
working classes. Germany years ago began to develop a 
system of compulsory insurance against accident, sickness, 
and old age, and has recently expanded it further. Its 
administration has not been free from evil, but it has had 
a wonderful sanitary effect on the economic life of the work- 
ing classes and on the industrial efficiency of the nation. 
Pauperism has disappeared from western Germany, and 
emigration to America has almost stopped. Under the 
leadership of Lloyd George, England has begun to move in 
the same direction. Her working people are hereafter to 
have support during sickness — and that includes maternity 
charges for women — and a pension of $1.25 a week in 
age. If now the liquor interests in Parliament and Church 
will allow the curse of drink in England to be abated, the 
human swamps of the nation will be drained in time. 

Of course, if the working people are to have more prop- 
erty, the question is, who is to have less? The only way 
to answer that question is to cut into the unearned wealth 
of the privileged classes. In England the movem.ent to 
abolish pauperism had as its counterpart the famous budget 
of Lloyd George which undertook to tax unearned incomes 
more heavily and for the first time to assess land values 
adequately. The impending increased taxation of the 
land has also inaugurated the breaking up of the great 
estates of England ; many thousands of acres have already 
been sold to small owners. As sin breeds sin, so righteous- 
ness breeds righteousness. 



PROPERTY AND A JOB AS MEANS OF GRACE 347 

Old age pensions and insurance against accident and 
sickness would give the kind of security which private 
investments have hitherto given, but it would not yet do for 
the modern workingman what the possession of a farm does 
for the farmer, and what the ownership of a shop used to 
do for the village mechanic. The industrial worker needs 
some property right in the industrial system in which he 
works. If he cannot be sole owner of a small shop, he must 
be part owner of a large shop. He must hold some frac- 
tional right like that of a shareholder in a joint-stock con- 
cern. Various lines of effort are converging on this end, 
voluntary cooperation, labor copartnership, profit sharing, 
etc. I am not discussing the methods here, but insisting 
that this is the direction in which the christianizing of the 
social order must move : the industrial worker must have 
property rights in industry. 

The simplest and most effective form which such property 
right could take would be the right of a man to a job. When 
a child first enters school, friendly hands receive it, direct it 
to its place, set its tasks, hold it to work, train its faculties, 
and promote it when it deserves promotion. On the 
other hand, when the child leaves school and enters industry, 
there is no place ready for it, no socialized intelligence to 
direct it to a job, and none to estimate what its faculties 
are best fitted for. After some years of experimenting, some 
find the work they can love; some remain misfits. If a 
man has a good job, he has no security that he can hold 
it, even if he does good work. ^'The propertyless man is a 
dependent when work is plenty, and a vagabond when work 
is slack." ^ He needs a secure tenure of employment, to 
last as long as he is efficient and honest, so that he cannot 
be discharged arbitrarily; and he needs an organization 
of industry that will help him to a job. 

^ Professor John R. Commons, in ''The Distribution of Wealth," pp. 79- 
85, has a brief but incisive discussion of the Right to Employriient. 



348 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The right to employment is the next great human right I 
that demands recognition in pubhc opinion and law. Iff 
this seems incredible to any one, let him remember that the 
right to hfe and hberty, which seem to us self-evident and 
) which the law protects with solemn sanctions, would have 
seemed equally preposterous in ancient times. A stranger 
could be killed at sight, and any unprotected man could 
be enslaved. The present social guarantee of the right of 
life and liberty to every individual has been the slow prod- 
uct of social and ethical evolution. The right to em- 
ployment is now in the process of evolution. Unless that 
right is added to the others, the right to life and liberty 
remains a fragmentary right so far as the workingman is 
concerned. The business class have fought for and secured 
for themselves the ^^ freedom of industry,'' which meant 
the right to have free access to nature and to produce wealth 
by manufacture and commerce. That right is valueless to 
the workingman under modern conditions ; his form of the 
same right is the right to a job. 

The moral instinct of the workingmen has long come to 
recognize this new right as among themselves. A man 
who does another out of his job arouses the same moral' 
indignation among his fellows which a man who removes 
landmarks or shifts a line-fence would arouse among farmers. 
^^Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor his ox, 
nor his ass," was a demand for security of property and 
income under agricultural conditions. '^Thou shalt not 
take thy neighbor's job," is the modern industrial equiva- 
lent for it. Employers, ministers, and other middle-class 
people have often misunderstood the ethical attitude of 
organized labor because they have failed to understand that 
the workingmen regard a. job as a property right. Many 
actions for which we have most severely condemned them 
were warped efforts to establish a higher code of ethics 
under adverse conditions. The time is coming when this 



PROPERTY AND A JOB AS MEANS OF GRACE 349 

property right will have the sanction of law. While the 
landlords of England owned the law-making power in 
Parliament, they wrote their property convictions into the 
law. They believed, for instance, that the owner of the 
land owned the birds of the air and the fish of the streams ; 
so they imprisoned and shot poachers for catching a rabbit 
or fish. As the working class wins political influence 
through the advance of democracy, they will certainly 
write their property convictions into the laws. Just as 
policemen, firemen, and other civil servants of the govern- 
ment have won security of tenure and can be discharged 
only for adequate cause, so the workingman must have 
security of tenure and a tribunal to which he can appeal 
if he is discharged arbitrarily. Public employment bureaus 
should put the best intelligence available at his command 
in finding a job, just as our consular service puts information 
at the command of business men seeking a market. Monop- 
olistic business has inflicted harm on the working class in 
I many ways ; it should at least benefit them by making 
' their employment steady by virtue of the superior stability 
I and far-sighted management possible in noncompetitive 
business. If all other means fail him, the workingman 
should be able to fall back on the community itself for 
employment. 

The right to employment would not only revolutionize 
the economic conditions of the industrial workers, but 
would dispel the curse of fear that is now on them, make 
the right to life and liberty effective, give them self-respect, 
and create a new attitude to their work. Wageworkers 
are often blamed for taking no interest in their work. When 
I consider how few motives they have for taking an interest 
in it, how Httle individuality they can put into it, and how 
little reward they have for doing it heartily, I rather wonder 
that almost every workingman still takes pride in his job. 
It is another proof of the ineradicable virtue in human 



350 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

nature. But if a man had a recognized status in his shop, 
a sense of belonging there, and a good expectation of re- 
maining there, a new foundation would be laid for the 
morality of labor. Teachers and professional men, artists, 

writers, soldiers, and civil officers come to love their workl 

. . ' 

for its own sake and to do their best work without reference 

to the material reward it may bring them. Why cannot 

the manual worker rise to the same moral dignity? He 

will when he becomes equally free. No slave of fear can be 

truly moral. 

Every man should have property. Individual hoards 
are becoming an impossible and antiquated form of property 
to large classes. The workingman must be protected in 
sickness and age by the collective wealth of the community. 
He must have a recognized property right in the industrial 
organization. The minimum form of that right is the 
right to get employment and to stay in his job as long as 
he does honest and efficient work. How long it will take 
us to reach this condition I do not know. That we must 
move in this direction seems to me clear. A condition 
in which one fourth of the race holds all the opportunities 
of livelihood in its arbitrary control, and the other three 
fourths are without property, without access to the earth, 
and without an assured means of even working for a living, 
is neither American nor Christian. Property is a means of 
grace, and a good job is another. 

In November, 191 1, 1 received a declaration of principles 
from the American Liberty and Property Association, 
signed by a number of individuals and corporations for 
whom I have the highest respect. The Association opposes 
'^ paternalistic" legislation, i.e. government control and 
ownership. I was not able to approve the principles as they 
stood, but should like to reprint them here with some 
amendments. It may make the difference in point of view 
clear for all. My additions are given in itahcs : — 



PROPERTY AND A JOB AS MEANS OF GRACE 351 

1. '^As the proper function of government is to maintain 
equal liberty, we are opposed to all class legislation, whether 
directed against the rights of individuals, or of corporations," 
or of the community. 

2. ^^ Every man has a right to labor at whatever useful oc- 
cupation he chooses, and is entitled to all that he earns by proper 
mental or physical exertion," and no more. 

3. ^^It is not the duty of the Government to save men from 
the results of their own improvidence, or to make them virtuous 
by law," hut to protect them from injury and impoverishment by 
those who are stronger. 

4. ^^ Our system of taxation should not discourage the accumu- 
lation of capital by taxing the results of superior ability, in- 
dustry or thrift," and still less by taxing the results of inferior 
ability, industry, or thrift more heavily. 

With these additions I should find myself in closer agree- 
ment with these four propositions and should regard them as 
more adapted to our real dangers. The fifth I should have 
to alter more radically. It reads : — 

5. "The best results to the community are attained under 
such open competition and personal liberty as does not inter- 
fere with the equal Hberty of others." 

I would suggest as a substitute : The best results to the 
community are attained by combining the highest degree 
of personal liberty with the most effective cooperation of 
aU. 



CHAPTER IV 

ECONOMIC DEMOCEACY 

When Jesus, at the beginning of his pubHc career, came 
to the synagogue of his home city of Nazareth, they handed 
him the roll of the prophet Isaiah, and he singled out these 
words to read : — 

"The spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me, 
Because Jehovah hath anointed me to proclaim glad tidings 

to the poor ; 
He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, 
To proclaim liberty to the captives 
And the bursting of the prison to them that are bound ; 
To proclaim the year of Jehovah's favor, 
And the day of vengeance of our God.'' ^ 

When these words were first written, they had promised 
an exiled nation freedom and restoration of its national 
life. Jesus declared that he found the purpose of his own 
mission in fulfilHng this prophecy, and thereby he adopted 
it as the pronimciamento and platform of Christianity. 
The words reverberate with freedom, and wherever the 
Gospel has retained even a breath of the spirit of Jesus in it, 
it has been a force making for freedom. If its official ex- 
ponents have ever turned it into a chain of the mind, may 
God forgive them. 

Christianity necessarily must be on the side of freedom 
if it is to fulfill its twofold purpose of creating strong and 
saved characters, and of establishing a redeemed and frater- 

* Isaiah Ixi and Luke iv. 
352 



ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 353 

nal social life, for neither of the two is possible without 
freedom. 

Freedom is the life breath of a christianized personaHty. 
A. servile class or nation lacks virility. Slaves and flunkies 
cringe, lie, and steal. Oppressed peoples resort to con- 
spiracies and assassinations. Free people organize. The 
general judgment of past ages that woman was a clog to the 
higher -aspirations of able men was really true in large part. 
As long as women were a subject class, they had the vices 
of a subject class. Men kept them ignorant and oppressed, 
and then were cursed by pulHng with unequal yokemates. 
Freedom is to character what fresh air is to the blood. 
This is the truth in Nietzsche's contempt for the morals of 
servility. 

Freedom is also the condition of a christianized social 
order. Men can have no fraternal relations until they face 
one another with a sense of freedom and of equal humanity. 
Despotism is always haunted by dread, and fear is not a 
symptom of the prevalence of fraternity. In tracing the 
moral evolution of the Family, the School, the Church, and 
the State, ^ we saw that every social organization is on the 
road to redemption when it finds the path of freedom. 

We are told that democracy has proved a failure. It has 
in so far as it was crippled and incomplete. Political de- 
mocracy without economic democracy is an uncashed prom- 
issory note, a pot without the roast, a form without sub- 
stance. But in so far as democracy has become effective, 
it has quickened everything it has touched. The criminal 
law, for instance, has lost its bloody vindictiveness since 
the advent of democracy ; men are now living who will see 
our penal institutions agencies of human redemption and 
restoration. Democracy has even quickened the moral 
conscience of the upper classes. The most awful poverty 
has always existed before the eyes of the rich, yet they 

1 Part III, Chapter II, of this book. 

2 A 



354 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

failed to see it till the lower classes became articulate 
through democracy. Is the cure of such bhndness not a 
moral achievement? 

Some forms of evil merely seem to multiply in a democ- 
racy because they get publicity there. Things that re- 
main discreetly hidden in a despotism are dragged into the 
open by the impertinent curiosity of the plebs. What an 
aristocracy calls hereditary rights, a democracy calls scan- 
dalous graft. When Roman patricians or French seigneurs 
unloosed the anger of the common man, they could retire 
within the haughty class consciousness of a soUd social 
group as into a bomb-proof shelter. In a democracy the 
extortionate rich must trust mainly to the thickness of 
their private skins. 

Rightly considered, even the sins of democracy have some 
background of honor. Three of our presidents have been 
assassinated within fifty years. Few despotisms have such 
a record. But let the czars and sultans mingle with their 
people as our presidents do, and who will carry their insur- 
ance risks ? A former czar is said to have asked the king 
of Prussia to lend him a Prussian officer to massage his 
imperial back, for he had no servant whom he could trust. 

Other things being equal, a free State is always stronger, 
for it commands the devotion of the people. The boasted 
military efficiency of a despotism goes bankrupt when the 
trained armies are used up ; a repubhc can stamp the ground 
and new armies will rise from the dust, as the history of 
Switzerland, Holland, the first French Republic, and the 
Boers testify. Switzerland has a citizen militia practicing 
marksmanship constantly with guns furnished by the 
government. Russia would not dare to arm and train its 
people ; neither would Germany and Austria. 

If the faults of our American democracy depress the 
mind of any one, let him consider this problem. When our 
Constitution was adopted, the suffrage was so restricted 



ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 355 

that only about 120,000 inhabitants out of 3,000,000 had 
a vote.^ During the colonial period a very large percentage 
of the immigrants arrived in a state of unf reedom ; not only 
the black people imported from Africa and the Antilles, and 
the subjugated Indians, but about half of the white immi- 
grants.^ Some were criminals sent by England ; many thou- 
sands were children and young people kidnapped for the co- 
lonial trade ; most of them were persons who had bought 
their passage by selKng themselves for a term of years as 
^'indentured servants''; all these were sold at the wharf 
when a vessel arrived or hawked about the villages in chains. 
Given: such beginnings, what would be the social condition 
of our country to-day if democracy had not meanwhile 
estabHshed manhood suffrage and prohibited slavery and 
peonage ? Is democracy, then, a failure ? 

Whatever theorists may say, the verdict of the people is 
all one way. No nation wants less freedom than it has. 
The people always seek to remedy the faults of democracy 
by still more democracy. For five hundred years democ- 
racy ha,s widened its concentric circles. The Renaissance of 
the fifteenth century began the democratizing of Educa- 
tion and the Intellect. The Reformation of the sixteenth 
century began the democratizing of the Church (which 
has taken more than three hundred years). The Revolu- 
tion of the eighteenth century began the democratizing of the 
State and the poHtical order. The Industrial Revolution 
of the nineteenth century began the democratizing of prop- 
erty. For let us not forget that Capitalism in its youth 
raised the battle cry of freedom. It was a revolutionary 
force bursting the rusty chains of feudal privilege and bring- 
ing property down where plain merit and ability could own 
it. It is true, the blessings of freedom and property were 
mainly confined to the merchants and manufacturers, and 

^ Simons, " Social Forces in American History," p. 97. 

2 Commons, '' Races and Immigrants in America," pp. 34-36. 



356 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

when Capitalism now raises its old watchwords of liberty, 
it is usually to defeat some movement for real liberty. 
The democratizing of property was only begun by Capital- 
ism. A new form of aristocracy has been built up. To-day 
we have neither free competition for business men, nor free 
contracts for workingmen, nor free markets for the consum- 
ers. Capitalism set out as the opponent of privilege and 
the champion of freedom ; it has ended by being the de- 
fender of privilege and the intrenchment of autocracy.^ The 
democratizing of property and industry must be resumed 
under new leadership. 

The ideal of Capitalism — in so far as it has a moral 
ideal and is not frankly mammonistic — is the wise and 
benevolent employer, who can manage the affairs of the 
workingmen better than they can do it themselves, and 
whose plans for their welfare will be rewarded by their 
respect and gratitude. A great deal of good will, earnest 
thought, and faithful effort have gone into the realization 
of this ideal, and not without permanent results. The 
danger which dogs it is that it leaves the working class in a 
dependent attitude and fails to call out the qualities of inde- 
pendence and initiative. It is the ideal of paternalism, 
and it is very funny to hear men who put their trust in it 
cry down labor legislation and public ownership as '^pater- 
nalistic.'' In point of fact, the benevolent-employer theory 
is as Utopian as any scheme of socialism in its infancy. 
The weight of experience is against it. Only scattered 
individuals have had enough moral vigor to act on it. In 
the long run it is easier to educate the workers to govern 
themselves than to educate a set of superior persons to do 
the governing for them. Moreover, it is more lasting. 
The benevolent employer dies or sells out, and therewith the 
constitutional guarantees of his happy employees are swept 

1 Part III, Chapter V, of this book. The present chapter presupposes 
the former. 



ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 357 

away. In politics the drift is away from one-man power ; 
in industry we shall have to move the same way. 

The alternative for an aristocracy of superior persons is 
the democracy of labor. John Stuart Mill formulated the 
ideal of industrial democracy finely: ^^The form of as- 
sociation which, if mankind continue to improve, must be 
expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can 
exist between a capitaHst as chief, and workpeople without 
a voice in the management, but the association of the 
laborers themselves on terms of equality, collectively own- 
ing the capital with which they carry on their operations, 
and working under managers elected and removable by 
themselves.'' ^ 

Two great movements are pushing toward the realization 
of this idea. The more radical of the two is SociaHsm. It 
stands in the midst of capitalistic society Uke a genuine 
republican party in a monarchical State, and seeks to lead 
the working class from ^^the kingdom of compulsion into the 
republic of freedom.'' The more conservative movement 
for industrial democracy is Trades-unionism. Just as a 
liberal party in a strong monarchy leaves the dynasty and 
its fundamental rights untouched, but demands parHa- 
mentary representation and the right to vote on the budget, 
so Trades-unionism recognizes the rights of the owner and 
employer under the present social order, but seeks constitu- 
tional guarantees and a Bill of Rights for the working class. 

In the long view of history I think there is not a shadow 
of doubt that the powerful employers and associations of 
employers that have set themselves rigidly against both 
of these movements toward industrial democracy, have 
chosen the wrong side. They have aHgned themselves 
with all the absolutist kings who resented the demand for a 
parhament or a douma as an interference with God-given 
rights, and yielded to compulsion as slowly and ungraciously 

1 Mill, " Principles of Political Economy," Vol. II, p. 357. 1868. 



358 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

as they could. The determination of great corporations 
to allow no labor organization to lift its head in their works 
is a present-day echo of the famous challenge of Louis XIV, 
''L'Etat, c'est moi!'' These employers speak of their 
''private business" and resent the interference of outsiders 
in it ; they use illustrations and maxims that might have 
been proper when a master mechanic employed three 
journeymen in his own home. Yet they command an 
industrial army of thousands ; the bread and life of great 
industrial towns is dependent on their decisions ; personal 
touch with their men is practically impossible. How can 
they call that a ^'private'' business? In all respects 
except legal property rights it is a public affair and the con- 
cern of all society. When one corporation combines the 
ownership of coal mines with the ownership of the railway 
that carries the coal, the business world protests against such 
a combination of powers as dangerous. But some corpora- 
tions have twisted all the strands of a workingman's life 
into one rope in far different fashion. They have fixed 
his wages and given him no voice about them ; they have 
provided the conditions under which he must work; they 
have housed him in drab-colored shanties in a fenced village 
in which the company owns every foot of the soil as land- 
lord, even the roads; they have compelled him to run an 
account at the ^' pluck'' store of the company and to accept 
their prices and measures. If then the man proved trouble- 
some, they can twitch the man's living, his home, his 
friendships, his whole existence from under him as the 
sheriff springs the death trap of a condemned man. Yet 
even such employers think there is no call for labor organiza- 
tions. The belief in hell has waned at a time when we need 
it badly. Some think we shall be born again on this earth 
under conditions such as we have deserved. It would 
certainly be a righteous judgment of God if he placed us 
amid the conditions we have created and allowed us to 



ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 359 

test in our own body the after effects of our life. How 
would a man feel if he knew that the little daughter that 
died in his arms twelve years ago was born as the child of 
one of his mill hands and is spinning his cotton at this 
moment ? 

If industrial democracy is coming, the workingmen as a 
class must be trained for the responsibility which the future 
will put upon them. In their own organizations and under 
their own leaders they must learn by practice that fairness 
and self-restraint without which democracy cannot work. 
If the labor organizations are suppressed and stunted, and 
if their energy is consumed in fighting their enemies instead 
of educating their members, the transition to the coopera- 
tive commonwealth wiU find them untrained, factious, and 
without tried leaders. Then we shall reap the results of 
the pohcy of suppression. 

The errors of the Unions, their excesses, and their bru- 
talities have been spread out for all to see. Their oppo- 
nents and the newspapers have not allowed us to under- 
estimate the number of dynamite outrages. But after 
the worst is said — they have never inflicted as much 
wrong as they have suffered. They have never been as 
rotten as the poHtical parties we have supported and cheered. 
Social workers and upper-class people who come into inside 
contact with the organizations of labor usually gain a deep 
respect for their moral soundness. As individuals the 
workingmen have all the faults of raw human nature, but 
their organizations act on higher and more humane princi- 
ples than the corresponding organizations of the commercial 
class.^ 

It is not enough to give the organizations of the working- 
men legal toleration. The Law must facilitate and regulate 
the organization of the industrial workers. They must 
have legal recognition and honorable rights and duties as 

1 See Part V, Chapter VII, of this book. 



360 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

important groups within the social body. Subject always 
to the supreme interests of the whole community every 
trade must have jurisdiction over the qualifications of its 
members ; the workingmen must have the right to bargain 
collectively with their employers; and jointly with the 
latter they must constitute tribunals of conciliation and 
arbitration. If any group can organize cooperative pro- 
duction and dispense with an employer entirely, it is to the 
interest of the commonwealth that they shall have all 
facilities to try the experiment. 

Some men see behind the slightest recognition of organ- 
ized labor the specter of a '4abor trust/' combining all the 
labor of a given industry and charging extortionate prices 
for their work. It is true that a legalized trade organiza- 
tion may become a nest of privilege, but at present that 
danger seems remote. Capitalistic monopolies unite the 
corporate powers bestowed by law with the rights secured 
by private property, and the real grip of their extortionate 
power lies in the latter. A monopoly of labor would at 
least not own the earth in addition, and any revolution 
which our children may have to start against the extortion- 
ate labor prices of the coal miners would be far more hopeful 
and easy than our revolution against the extortionate coal 
prices of the mining corporations. 

The transition to industrial democracy will put every 
employer to a moral test, perhaps the severest of all. Is he 
willing to relinquish autocratic power and trust increasingly 
to superior moral and intellectual efficiency for the leader- 
ship he claims ? If he heartily consents to that, he proves 
that he is an American indeed, and that Christianity is 
more than a fine emotion to him. Even if he is willing, he 
will encounter misunderstandings, suspicions, unreasoning 
waves of emotion, and malicious demagogism among those 
whom he is trying to meet halfway. If so, he will suffer 
vicariously for the sins of other employers, of foreign nations, 



ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY ' 361 

and of past generations. This stunted life and these in- 
stinctive antagonisms are the results of generations of wrong, 
and it will take time to outgrow them. On the other hand, 
if he has sober expectations, he may find himself rewarded 
beyond all his hopes by the good will of his workmates. 
And whether he fares well or ill, the old despotic relation is 
played out. It is becoming intolerable to both sides. The 
finer spirits among the employing class are ready for a new 
deal. If they have to choose between the present industrial 
war and the possible troubles of industrial democracy, the 
latter may be a real reHef. 

Economic democracy means more than the right of the 
organized workers to control their own industry. It means 
also the control of the people over their own Hvelihood. 
It means the right and power to straighten out the Hne of 
communication that runs from the farm to the kitchen and 
the elimination of the middleman's profits that make food 
prices dear. It means the power to cut all monopoly prices 
out of business and to base prices solely on service rendered. 
Democracy means the absence of class rule; monopoly 
contains the essence of class rule. The power to charge a 
monopoly price shows that part of the taxing power of the 
government has gone astray into private hands, and that 
a privileged class is exercising the attributes of sovereignty 
over the rest. Therefore every lessening of monopoly 
profit is a step toward economic democracy. When we 
limit the price charged by common carriers so that they 
earn only a reasonable return on the capital actually in- 
vested ; when we prohibit capitalization that has no actual 
investment behind it ; when public ownership converts the 
lucrative stock of a corporation into the modest bonds of a 
city or state, we are moving away from economic aristocracy 
and modern feudalism. 

Every genuine advance in economic democracy in history 
has involved a fight for poHtical democracy. The larger 



362 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

economic and political movements are invariably two sides 
of the same thing. The possessing classes are also the gov- 
erning classes. They have to control the government and 
make the laws in order to exercise their economic privileges 
in safety. Consequently if the people want to stop ex- 
ploitation, they must get control of government. When the 
English democracy tried to tax unearned wealth for social 
purposes, a political crisis promptly arose. The Lords 
tried to block the Commons and had to be curbed. In our 
country the effort to curb the arrogant power of the monopo- 
lies and lessen their unearned profits has resulted in a politi- 
cal conflict all along the line. The smoke of masked bat- 
teries has risen from every political hilltop, showing how 
completely the enemy had occupied every strategical position. 
The movements for direct primaries, for commission govern- 
ment, for direct legislation, for the recall, and for the direct 
election of senators are the political counterpart of the 
struggle for economic democracy and emancipation. The 
political confusion and bitterness of the presidential cam- 
paign of 191 2 get their significance and dignity only from 
the economic issues involved and the immense social forces 
struggling for the mastery of the country. The genuine 
leaders of these movements are not fighting for names and 
forms, but for realities, for our homes, our children, and our 
manhood. 

In their struggle with economic aristocracy the people 
are handicapped by their inveterate morality. The great 
Interests have had no mercy on the public ; they have 
crippled the public good for private profit, resisted public 
control, hired the best lawyers to thwart the law, and tam^- 
pered with the poorly paid servants of the people. On the 
other hand the people are more than fair. They fall in 
with the point of view that when graft has been enjoyed 
securely for some time it becomes a vested right. They are 
merciful toward those who have accommodated themselves 



ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 363 

to unearned wealth. A mature democracy, such as the 
Swiss, the EngHsh, and our own, is usually highly conserva- 
tive. Democracy constantly balances conflicting interests, 
and so becomes a college of compromise. But when pubHc 
opinion is convinced, it moves with the finahty of a land- 
sKde. Democracies seem vacillating, but they stay put 
when they move. 

Democracy has become a spiritual hope and a rehgious 
force. It stands for the sanitation of our moral relations, 
and for the development of the human soul in freedom and 
self-control. In som^e future social order democracy may 
possibly stand for the right to be unequal. In our present 
social order it necessarily stands for miore equahty between 
man and man. 

Men are unequal in their capacities, and always will be, 
and this inherent inequahty of talent will inevitably be 
registered in some inequality of possessions. But beneath 
the superficial inequalities of intellect lies the fundamental 
endowment of human personaHty, and in that we are all 
equal. Wherever we get close enough to our fellows to 
realize their humanity, we feel an imponderable spiritual 
reahty compared with which all wealth-getting gifts are 
trivial. Our children may differ widely in physical per- 
fection and intellectual abihty, but the strong child and 
the crippled child are ahke Hfe of our life, and the same 
mysterious human soul gazes at us out of their inscrutable 
baby eyes. Outsiders may rate the gifts of a husband and 
his wife very unequally, but the gifted partner often knows 
that all his cleverness is like autumn leaves and that in 
human worth his quiet mate outranks him. In the family 
it is love which acts as the revealer of this profound human 
dignity and equahty. In society at large the Christian 
rehgion has been incomparably the strongest force in assert- 
ing the essential equality of all souls before God. 

Democracy aids in christianizing the social order by 



364 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

giving political and economic expression to this fundamental 
Christian conviction of the worth of man. We do not want 
absolute equality ; we do want approximate equality. We 
can at least refrain from perpetuating and increasing the 
handicap of the feebler by such enormous inequalities of 
property as we now have. To assert that they really cor- 
respond to. the actual differences in intellectual ability is 
idle talk, and it becomes more absurd with every year as we 
see the great fortunes grow. They are an institutionalized 
denial of the fundamental truths of our religion, and De- 
mocracy is the archangel whom God has sent to set his 
blazing foot on these icebergs of human pride and melt 
them down. 

Men say that equality would hold ability down under a 
dead weight of mediocrity. If ability can be held down it 
is not very able. If the time ever comes when the strong are 
oppressed, I shall gladly join a crusade for their emancipa- 
tion. Meantime I judge with the old German composer 
Zeller : ^^ A genius can do anything. A genius will shampoo 
a pig and curl its bristles.'' Disciplined intellect will ask 
no odds except of the Almighty. 



CHAPTER V 

THE ECONOMIC BASIS FOR FRATERNITY 

Suppose, now, that we had such a social order as we have 
been praying for in the preceding chapters, — an order in 
which justice and economic democracy prevailed, in which 
all unearned incomes were stopped, in which men had the 
right to a living as they now have the right to Kfe, and in 
which the chances of prosperity and distinction were open 
to all on fairly equal terms. How, then, would these free 
and equal men act together in their economic relations? 
Should they compete? Should they cooperate? Should 
the bulk of productive work be done by small economic 
units in open competition, diversified, perhaps, by the 
pubhc management of some great natural monopolies? 
Or would the christianizing of the social order call for the 
creation of a great cooperative system of production, diver- 
sified by small and scattered sections of private and com- 
petitive effort ? 

The former was the ideal taught by the old political 
economy, and has been the inspiration of many of the finest 
upper-class champions of democracy and human rights. 
It takes its most militant and influential form to-day in 
"the philosophy of the Single Tax, and we could ill spare 
the brave spirit and indoctrinating power of that move- 
ment from our public life. ^ But it seems to me to ex- 
haust its great moral force in the opposition against un- 
just privilege, and to lack constructive faith. In the noble 

^The movement is represented by the Public, of Chicago, one of the 
ablest weeklies in the country, a stanch friend of all real democracy. 

365 



366 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

motto of the French Revolution, ''Liberty, EquaHty, 
Fraternity/' the first two terms are mainly negative; the 
chief positive value is contained in the third. Economic 
individualism is strong in its emphasis on liberty and 
equality, but weak in the economic basis it offers for frater- 
nity. Is fair and open competition really the last and best 
word of the social hope? Are we to live like the little 
lobsters in the tank of a government hatchery, each wolfing 
for itself, and preying on its neighbor when the food supply 
runs low ? 

In the first century of our era a new social organization 
spread through the Roman Empire. It had ^ force of 
cohesion so strong that it bound men of all races and social 
classes into fraternity, resisted the crushing pressure of 
the Roman despotism, and survived all the shocks and 
changes of European society for nineteen hundred years. 
One of the earliest leaders of this remarkable organization 
formulated its social philosophy from the biology of the 
human organism. The ideal society, he said, has an un- 
limited diversity of organs and functions, but a fundamental 
unity of life, motive, and purpose ; it is perfect in the 
measure in which every member has the support and pro- 
tection of the whole body, and in turn serves the whole in 
its due place. ^ Paul's philosophy of the Christian Church 
is the highest possible philosophy of human society. The 
ideal society is an organism, and the christianizing of the 
social order must work toward an harmonious cooperation 
of all individuals for common social ends. 

Fraternity needs an economic basis if it is to be made 
a vigorous and substantial part of social life. In turn 
fraternity alone offers a spiritual faith strong enough to 
inspire the mass movements necessary to overthrow in- 
herited privilege. Individualism has pounded the protec- 
tive tariff for generations and not yet rooted up its worst 

* I Corinthians xii. 



THE ECONOMIC BASIS FOR FRATERNITY 367 

evils. The ideal of cooperative fraternity has found its 
most coherent and dogmatic form in socialism, and social- 
ism has an incomparably stronger moral appeal with the 
masses than economic individualism ever had. In his 
Autobiography ^ John Stuart Mill has sketched the gradual 
maturing of his social hopes, and the course traversed by 
that bold, clear mind has since been followed by social 
thought at large. At first he looked only for some slight 
mitigation of the inequalities of property by the aboHtion 
of primogeniture and entails in England, by the educa- 
tion of the working classes, and the voluntary restraint of 
propagation. In time he passed from mere democracy to 
socialism: '^We were now much less democratic than I 
had been, because as long as education continues to be so 
wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and es- 
pecially the selfishness and brutality of the mass ; but our 
ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, 
and would class us decidedly under the general designa- 
tion of Socialists. . . . The social problem of the future 
we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual 
liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw mate- 
rial of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the 
benefits of combined labor. Between communism and all 
its chances, and the present state of society with all its 
sufferings and injustices, all the difficulties, small or great, 
of communism would be but as dust in the balance." 

If the christianizing of the social order involves ulti- 
mately the evolution of a cooperative economic organi- 
zation as wide as society, we confront the largest construc- 
tive moral task ever undertaken. It is hard enough to get 
four or five men to work together without serious friction. 
To induce a hundred or a thousand to cooperate without 
tyrannous coercion is a work of strategy and art. Hu- 
manity took centuries to consolidate the patriarchal family, 

1 pp. 230-234. 



368 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

the village commune, or the modern State. A cooperative 
commonwealth would join in associated work millions of 
people of low intelligence and education, but of strong pas- 
sions and egotisms, who will have to render honest and 
faithful service in the main, and subordinate their passions 
to a higher reason and the common good, if the cooperative 
system is not to break down and relapse into some form of 
despotism. If any one thinks such an organization can be 
evolved by the mere propaganda of an economic doctrine 
or the creation of a strong party, let him take a contract 
to build a suspension bridge with a clothesline. But if 
any one thinks it is beyond the possibilities of human nature, 
let him rub his eyes and look around him. 

The evolutionary process ,by which a great cooperative 
system will eventually be built up is now going on all 
about us. Intellectual persuasion and moral conviction 
are invaluable factors in the process, but they would never 
by themselves overcome the resistance of selfishness and 
conservatism. In this business the rude hand of economic 
necessity is fortunately on the side of the moral ideal, 
shoving and jamming and hauling the obstinate factors 
around into their places. The very hugeness of the modern 
machine, both steel and human, demands teamwork, the 
orderly interlocking of more and more, and bigger and bigger 
units of productive force. The story of modern industry 
is the story of the aggregation of labor and the cooperation 
of intellect. The first half century of capitalism per- 
fected the business firm ; the second half century wrought 
out the corporation. The corporation marks a long stride 
toward social cooperation. The time was when the best 
observers held that the corporation could never develop 
enough initiative and devotion to business to compete with 
the swift powers of decision and the keen personal interest 
of the single owner or the business firm. Yet the corpora- 
tion is steadily superseding the old-fashioned private busi- 



THE ECONOMIC BASIS EOR FRATERNITY 369 

ness in all the large and distinctively modern forms of 
undertaking. The private firm was evolved from household 
production and was based on personal efficiency and family 
coherence. The corporation is the product of modern 
traffic. It is a higher stage in the education of society in 
the difficult art of cooperation, combining vastly more 
units of labor and capital. The claim that human nature 
could not furnish the moral qualities necessary to make 
the corporation work has been disproved by the course of 
events. Have we now reached the limits of the coopera- 
tive capacities in human nature, or is the corporation the 
stepping-stone to something larger still? 

Whenever any one holds up the hope of a cooperative 
commonwealth, the question is almost invariably raised : 
^^ Where will you get the kind of men to make such a social 
order work?'' The question involuntarily betrays the 
consciousness that the present order is not producing a 
sufficient stock of conscience and public devotion to equip 
any social order resting on a really ethical basis. Capital- 
ism has overdeveloped the selfish instincts in us all and left 
the capacity of devotion to larger ends shrunken and atro- 
phied. But a little observation of actual life will show us 
that it is not dead. Whenever an individual enters a social 
group that calls for free obedience and devotion, there is 
some response of his moral nature. When a selfish man 
marries, he begins to labor with all his might to support 
the family group and even to protect them against want 
after he is dead. When a self-willed and obstinate little 
child from a lonely home enters the kindergarten, it soon 
submits to the higher will and the orderly collective fife of 
the schoolroom. When a half-grown boy enters a shop, it 
maybe no ideal place for him, but it is an organized commu- 
nity of labor, and it assimilates him and helps to make a man 
of him. The love with which men freely work for their 
church, their lodge, their union, their philanthropic society, 

2B 



370 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

their party, their city, their country, demonstrates what 
enduring loyalties a true social organism can evoke in its 
members. Make a man a trustee of an institution, let 
him serve it for years, and it becomes part of his life. He 
prays for it, plans for it, and endows it when he dies ; yet 
it never did anything for him except to give him an honor- 
able chance to serve his fellow-men. Would that same man 
be too selfish to serve the cooperative commonwealth with 
devotion ? In our present economic order the accumula- 
tion of private property has been the only means of secur- 
ing personal safety and advancement. Year in and year 
out men have to plan and labor intensely for their own busi- 
ness profit. Is it any wonder that the roots of their minds 
are coiled inside of that flowerpot? Compel them to 
think for the common good, connect their personal welfare 
and wealth with the prosperity and opulence of the com- 
munity, spur them with the fear of public shame or the hope 
of public distinction, and see what heroic exertions they 
wdll put forth in the service of the commonwealth ! 

There is a great stirring of public spirit in all kinds 
of organizations, chambers of commerce, trades-unions, 
women's clubs, churches, publicity associations ; they all 
want to serve humanity, but there is no harness available 
in which to hitch them. If the pent-up moral willingness 
of our nation could be set free to move toward organized 
fraternity, the forward rush would probably astonish us 
by its swiftness. We are forcibly held back from larger 
cooperative undertakings by the unsocial perversity in- 
herent in Capitalism. In many of our cities the people 
are morally and intellectually ready now to undertake the 
cooperative management of their gas and electricity and 
street railways by means of municipal ownership, but the 
capitalistic group, wants the profits and uses all its powers 
to frustrate and discourage public ownership. If the 
nation could vote by referendum on the government owner- 



THE ECONOMIC BASIS EOR FRATERNITY 37 1 

ship of telegraphs and telephones, the people would probably 
seize the chance to widen the scope of their cooperative 
efforts, but the profit-makers refuse to let them. The 
flower of the working class is bending all its efforts to stop 
the suicidal system of pitting every workingman against his 
fellows and to substitute the principle of solidarity for that 
of anarchy. But Capitalism opposes their efforts for co- 
operation because the organization of labor would impair 
the profits of capital. Capital itself is anxious to unite 
still further, for the large cooperative organization of 
capital is manifestly sensible and profitable. But the 
public has found out by terrible experience what the enor- 
mous powers of association signify when they are wielded 
by an irresponsible financial aristocracy for purposes of 
extortion, and the public is afraid. The nemesis of its 
greed has come on Capitalism. The moral forces of the 
community are lined up to prevent Business from moving 
toward larger cooperation. The guerrilla warfare of petty 
competition has come to look like a paradise of peace to 
the suffering public. The Government, as the guardian 
of public interests, is forced into the attitude of an ob- 
structionist of social progress. Our public life has become 
a huge tragi-comedy in which we are all trying not to do 
what we all know we shall have to do anyway. This is 
the enchanted maze into which the wily Devil of Profit has 
conjured us, and here we go milHng around in sweaty 
stupidity. 



CHAPTER VI 

QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 

An unchristian economic order tempts men and debases 
character, sets individuals and classes into unfraternal 
antagonism to one another, and institutionalizes wide- 
spread disloyalty to the common good. A Christian eco- 
nomic order would aid in training sound and strong indi- 
viduals by its assimilating influence, would place men in 
righteous relations to one another and to the commonwealth, 
and so promote the Christian purpose of giving all a chance 
to live a saved life. 

In the foregoing chapters we have inquired in what 
direction our economic life must move in order to ap- 
proximate a Christian condition. 

A Christian order must be just. Unjust privilege and 
unearned incomes debase the upper classes by parasitism, 
deprive the lower classes of their opportunity to develop 
their God-given life, and make genuine fraternity impossible 
between the classes. 

A Christian economic order must offer to all members of 
the community the blessed influence of property rights. 
If modern industrial conditions no longer permit the workers 
a chance to own their productive plant and to accumulate 
enough for security, property must take the new form of a 
share in social wealth which will guarantee security in sick- 
ness and age and give a man an assured position in the 
workshop of the nation. 

Our economic order must work away from one-man power 
toward the democratizing of industry. It must take the 

372 



QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 373 

taxing powers of monopoly from an irresponsible aristoc- 
racy and put the people in full control of their own liveli- 
hood. It must do away with the present unethical in- 
equalities of wealth and approximate a human equality. 

A Christian economic order must organize all workers 
in systematic and friendly cooperation, and so create the 
material basis for Christian fraternity. 

These fundamental demands of the Christian spirit are 
all simple and almost axiomatic, but they cut deep and are 
revolutionary enough to prove that they are really the laws 
of the Kingdom of God on earth. 

Every forecast of the future lies under the suspicion of 
being the iridescent dream of a single mind, interesting 
perhaps, but without authority for the rest of us. The 
^^ practical man'' sets all things new aside and rests con- 
tentedly on the things to which he is accustomed and which 
he supposes to be universal and eternal. We could make 
out an excellent case to prove to the social conservative 
that polygamy, slavery, alcoholism, and monarchical gov- 
ernment have the almost universal consent of mankind 
through all the ages, and of the larger part of humanity 
to-day, so that we ought to view with seasoned suspicion 
any revolutionist who tells us that we ought to keep sober, 
have one wife, run a republic, and refrain from buying and 
selling women and babies. 

Yet the practical man is right at bottom. What is 
wholly new is not likely to be true. The common sense of 
mankind ought to have weight with us. We all feel surer 
of our convictions when we find them held by great numbers 
and running far back into the past. The Catholic Church 
bases its claim to authority on that feeling. It claims to 
teach that doctrine which has always and everywhere and 
by all been held as the substance of the Christian faith, 
and by that traditional wisdom to brush aside the novel 
inventions of heresy. Only we must be very sure that we 



374 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

are really listening to the voice of God in history, and not 
to the unanimous consent of human sinfulness. Majori- 
ties do not necessarily stand for truth and justice. They 
stand for the customs and convictions of the past. They 
embody the solid experience and common sense of millions, 
but also their stolid prejudices and superstitions. The 
higher moral purposes which are now stirring unborn be- 
neath the heart of mankind, and maturing toward that day 
of birth which God alone knows, are not registered in 
majorities. God's pioneers are always few. To trace the 
movements of God in history, we must not look to the broad 
bulk of mankind, but to the forward movements of the 
choicest members and segments of the race in whom the 
spirit of God got a lodgment and worked his will. They, 
and not the Sanhedrin and the crowd before the palace of 
Pilate, constitute the true Church of Jesus Christ, whose 
consent should have weight with us. 

The ablest, purest, bravest, and most Christlike men have 
always headed in substantially the same direction. The 
noblest and most fraternal social groups have always reached 
out for the same essentials of a righteous social life. The 
richness and fullness with which such men were able to un- 
fold the faith that was in them depended on their personal 
gifts and on the favor of circumstances. The form in which 
such social groups cast their social life depended on their 
historic environment. Usually they emphasized some 
special form of righteousness because that was the pro- 
test against some special form of iniquity which oppressed 
them. But wherever God got a foothold among men, we find 
an irrepressible drift in the same direction, an effort always 
renewed and reawakened in spite of defeat, always seeking 
to realize a just, free, and fraternal community life. This 
I hold to be a true consent of the saints of God, that faith 
of the Kingdom of God which has always and everywhere 
and by all true souls been held in spite of suffering and death, 



QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 375 

the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ah omnibus of the Church 
CathoHc. The blood of the martyrs surely attests it. If 
to-day we find the faith of these elect groups becoming the 
clear faith of millions ; if the hand of prince and priest is 
no longer able to stifle it ; if the pace of freedom is quicken- 
ing, and increasing freedom is used to achieve increasing 
justice, — we may well feel that the great day of Jehovah 
is near for which our fathers waited and strove. 

Wherever historical investigation has uncovered the 
early history of our Aryan race, we see communities of 
free men in organized fraternity of life. These forefathers 
of ours met in assembly to govern themselves, choosing their 
leaders freely as needed. The land, which was then the one 
great instrument of production, was owned in common, and 
citizenship involved not only the right to vote, but the 
right to share in the common property. The combination 
of community property with private property was the 
characteristic feature of their economic organization. The 
forest with its wood and game, and the water with its fish, 
were common wealth which could be used by all according 
to regulations made by all. Every family owned its cattle, 
but it was pastured by the village herdsmen on the common 
pasture land. The plowland was divided in severalty 
to the famihes, but still owned by the community and re- 
divided when changes in the population demanded it. A 
building site in the village was assigned to every family, 
and all helped a young couple erect their home, just as our 
farming communities still give their friendly help at a 
barn raising. New ground was often cleared in common. 
The larger buildings of the community and all extensive 
enterprises were undertaken in common. Approximate 
equality of possession was maintained and the aggressive 
acquisitiveness of individuals was kept in check as a menace 
to the freedom and property of all. All the concrete in- 
stitutions of society were based on the sense of sohdarity 



376 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

and trained men to fraternity. Outsiders were under no 
protection of law, but for those inside it was ^'all for each 
and each for all." Within the community every man had 
security for life, every woman protection of her honor. 
Before the courts of the nation the community answered 
for its members and bore their fines. 

Thus the essentials of a righteous social life, justice, 
property, democracy, equality, cooperation, were em- 
bodied in the rude and simple conditions of these com- 
munities. Here the social supremacy of the Aryan race 
manifested itself and got its evolutionary start. Here the 
traditions of democracy and justice were dyed into the fiber 
of our breed so that they outlasted ages of despotism and re- 
asserted themselves whenever the grip of tyranny slackened. 

In time these simple fraternal democracies were every- 
where weakened or disrupted by the inroads of the strong. 
Perhaps it had to be so. Chiefs intrusted with tempo- 
rary authority by the community held fast their power and 
made it hereditary. The stronger members of the commu- 
nity took more than their share of the common land and its 
advantages, and claimed its permanent use. When kings 
rose in war, they stretched their powers in peace and gave 
away the property rights of the people to their underlings. 
The Church was given a share of the common lands and 
then amassed more. The old customary law, in which 
the rights and freedoms of the community were laid down, 
was twisted or set aside by the powerful men who made 
the new laws. At last the Roman law, with the deadly 
exaggeration of private property rights and lordly power 
which it brought down from the imperial despotism, legal- 
ized injustice and swept away the remnants of popular 
rights » So primitive democracy was slowly broken down 
and monarchical and aristocratic power was built up. The 
law of fraternity expressed in land communism was sup- 
planted by the law of force and covetousness. The rich and 



QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 377 

poor moved apart. Primitive democracy and fraternity had 
been based on blood kinship and neighborhood feehng. It 
broke down as the community outgrew those moral ties. 

But not everywhere aUke. Some nations and some com- 
munities retained far larger elements of their early democracy 
and communism than others. Where the law of private 
covetousness had free swing, the common people were im- 
poverished and lost their virility. Wherever a community 
succeeded in combining popular liberty with common prop- 
erty rights and capacity for united action, the intellectual 
ability and moral integrity of the breed was preserved and 
further trained. Thus the republics of Greece and Rome 
developed their famous life because they fought off the 
oppressors longer than others. The history of the Greek 
repubHcs is a history of the struggle of democracy with 
the encroachments of the strong, and the question at issue al- 
ways was the use of the common lands and the fraternal prop- 
erty rights of the people. The great names of Hellas and 
Rome, Solon, Lycurgus, Manlius, and the Gracchi, were the 
men who led in the struggles to Hmit the amount of land to be 
owned by individuals, to restore the use of the common lands 
to the people, and to save their nation from an utter denial 
of the principle of human fraternity. If we could trans- 
late the struggles of their agricultural age into the modern 
industrial equivalents, we should find that they were fight- 
ing against trusts, franchise grabbers, labor crushers, and 
party bosses just Hke we. 

It is wonderful with what tenacity the institutions of 
fraternal democracy maintained their life. For instance, 
the common meals that were customary at Sparta, Athens, 
Rome, and many cities were remnants of an early com- 
munistic organization and nuclei of happiness and frater- 
nity. The village communities, the town guilds, the city 
republics, the religious fraternities of the Middle Ages, 
were continuations under changed forms of older commu- 



378 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL OEDER 

nistic democracies. The finer breeds of vegetable and ani- 
mal life are one of the most precious acquisitions of civili- 
zation. They can be transmitted and perfected easily, 
but who could reinvent the Northern Spy or the Jersey 
breed if it perished, or reorganize the vocal chords of the 
nightingale or mocking bird ? So the higher strains of 
social organization are rarely invented; they are trans- 
mitted. Those communities in which the essentials of 
fraternal democracy were rescued from the inroads of 
tyranny, furnished other communities, often in distant con- 
tinents and ages, with the model and inspiration of democ- 
racy. Our American democracy was no new invention; 
English and Dutch liberties merely grew to bolder size on 
the new soil. The influence exerted by the republican 
traditions of Greece and Rome on the intellectual classes 
has been beyond computation. The Swiss communities, 
which by the favor of their mountains have always pre- 
served large fragments of their primitive community life, 
such as the town meeting and common forests and pasture 
rights, for centuries held up before northern Europe the 
models of democracy. When the Reformation took root 
on Swiss soil, it there developed a type of church organi- 
zation that proved one of the most powerful allies of de- 
mocracy and education. The initiative and referendum, 
the last-forged weapons in .the hand of our own insurgent 
democracy, were forged in the smithy of Swiss self-govern- 
ment. What would humanity be by this time if the free 
institutions of the Aryan village community had every- 
where been preserved and developed in unbroken historical 
continuity as they have been in Switzerland ? 

Christianity itself is such a strain of higher social hfe 
derived from one of the breeding grounds of righteousness. 
Israel was one of the unsubdued communities in which the 
love of freedom and justice was kept alive through all 
disaster. The sacred writings of the nation carried the 



QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 379 

burning words of its religious revolutionists down the cen- 
turies. The social passion for fraternity was enormously 
intensified through the influence of Jesus himself. With 
that social impetus derived from the prophets and from 
Jesus Christianity entered the Roman world like a young 
mountain torrent. For three centuries it was as much in 
opposition to the existing society as socialism is now. If 
any one wants to understand the spirit with which some 
Christians regarded the Empire, let him read the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth chapters of the Revelation of John 
and imagine that he were reading about the impending 
destruction of London or New York. Even after Con- 
stantine accepted the Church as his ally, the Christian 
spirit was still in protest against the social order. The 
Church Fathers were practically unanimous in holding that 
the State and private property had come into the world 
through the Fall; in other words, the despotic State, as 
they knew it, with its coercion and cruelty, and the system 
of exploiting wealth, were not a wise institution of God, 
but a product of human sin, and would disappear if the 
power of sin was broken. 

When the Church gained its wonderful ascendency over 
the social life of the Teutonic nations, it set itself against 
those economic tendencies which have since resulted in 
capitalism. It prohibited the breeding of money from 
money by interest. It discountenanced the unlimited 
accumulation of wealtji. It condemned monopoly profit 
and taught the doctrine of the ^'fair price'' as a just reward 
for labor cost. To take advantage of a man's necessity to 
raise the price was regarded as extortion. The Jews, who 
were not under the law of the Church, were free to practice 
the principles of capitalism centuries before its time. That 
made them rich ; it also made them hated and despised. In 
the long run the Church was not able to hold back the com- 
mercial hunger for profit and has modified its teaching to 



380 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

suit the code of business, but it deserves more credit than it 
has ever received for the stand it made against exploitation. 
The medieval monasteries were the pure cultures of the 
social bacillus of Christianity. Here the Christian spirit 
went out of the world to fashion a little world of its own. 
The asceticism of the monasteries was one thing; their 
social organization was another. Every monastery was 
essentially a communistic republic. Whoever entered an 
order left all distinctions of rank and wealth behind ; they 
were blotted out in the uniform garb, the name of 
'^Brother," and the simple life common to all. In most 
monasteries the governing power was vested in the breth- 
ren. The abbot or prior might exercise stern powers of 
command, but it was understood to be for the common 
good, like the discipline of a teacher or parent. The prop- 
erty of the order was owned in common and usually worked 
in common. The vow of poverty meant the abjuring of 
private property. The monastic orders were always falling 
away from their social ideals because they were always 
invaded by the life of the world about them, just as the 
nobler social organizations and professions to-day are in- 
vaded by capitalism. Secular society was full of idle and 
lascivious men, living on rent and the labor of others. Is it 
strange that cliques of monks developed in the monasteries 
who domineered over the poor lay brethren and left the 
manual toil to them ? Or that entire monasteries became 
parasitic groups living on the surrounding secular com- 
munity by means of rents? Whenever a monastery or 
convent grew rich by gifts, the nobility quartered their 
landless younger sons or unmarried daughters in it, and so 
wrested it from its purpose. But the pride and exploita- 
tion that were a matter of course in secular life were at 
least felt to be a shame and degradation in monastic life, 
and the Christian spirit was incessantly striving to rescue 
its own peculiar community life. In spite of all corrup- 



QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 381 

tions, these fraternal democracies were the haven of all 
idealistic spirits and the fountainheads of all nobler spirit- 
ual and social impulses for centuries. The Roman Catholic 
Church still points to these communistic settlements as the 
finest flower of its spiritual life. To-day socialism is seek- 
ing to establish on a world-wide scale some of the essential 
principles of the monastic societies, the aboHtion of rank, 
the duty of work, the combination of manual and spiritual 
labor, and fraternal property rights. The Catholic Church 
feels compelled to oppose socialism. Is it then in some 
other form putting its sentence of condemnation on exist- 
ing society with the same clear severity as in the medieval 
monastic communities? 

Radical Protestants may not be moved by arguments 
drawn from Roman CathoHc monasticism, but what will they 
do with the fact that the evangelical sects of the Middle Ages, 
in whom they are accustomed to see the remnants of the 
true Church, had practically the same social ideals ? They 
too demanded simphcity and voluntary poverty, fraternal 
love, and sharing with the needy. Therewith they repudi- 
ated as unchristian the class pride, the ostentatious luxury, 
the commercial covetousness, and the enthronement of 
money which Christians who take their ethics from capital- 
ism can stomach without qualms. Existing society seemed 
to some of these old evangehcal bodies so sinful that they 
would not allow their members to get mixed up in its in- 
iquities by holding public office. They were too bitterly 
persecuted to have a full opportunity for organizing their 
social life according to their own convictions, but when they 
did have a chance, they tried to create little cooperative 
commonwealths. Our own country has given the spiritual 
descendants of some of these bodies the freedom of action 
which Europe denied them, and they have dotted America 
with cooperative colonies. These communistic colonies 
are profoundly pathetic. Whether a colony succeeds or 



382 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

fails financially, its members are withdrawn from the rich 
life of human society and condemned to isolation and nar- 
rowness. But considered as protests against the cruelty, 
covetousness, and unbrotherliness of our civilization, they 
are deserving of far more attention than they receive. To 
lift a body of people out of the old grooves of life, to make 
them give up their private property and risk their lives on 
a great venture in fraternity requires a tremendous moral 
force. Yet for every hundred Christians who have actu- 
ally joined a cooperative colony, there have probably been 
ten thousand who have wished that they might. 

Our college and university communities offer their con- 
tribution to an inductive study of fraternal community 
life. Why do we all look back to our college days with such 
strange attachment ? It is not merely the glamour of youth 
that lights those sunlit spaces of our memory, for we were 
young before college and after it. It is not necessarily the 
ease and comfort we enjoyed ; some of us worked hard and 
have never again been so pinched by poverty as when we 
earned our education. Why, then, do the college days seem 
set apart from the rest ? Is it not because we were members 
of a fraternal community life ? A college is essentially a 
democracy. There is authority; work is exacted; but 
the authority of the faculty is leadership for the common 
good, and the work does not use men up, but builds them up. 
The individual is impelled by great collective loyalties to 
do his best. He is made free of the campus, the library, 
and a large endowment of collective property rights. 
Worth and manhood count ; if wealth and social rank also 
count, the college is ashamed of it. The faculty and presi- 
dent receive honor, often extravagant honor, but they are 
not in a social class apart. The youngest freshman can 
sit at prexy's table and court the dean's daughter. The 
faculty differ in salary and standing, but the extremes are 
rarely farther apart than $1000 and $10,000, and the career 



QUOD SEMPER, QUOD UBIQUE, QUOD AB OMNIBUS 383 

is open from bottom to top. For such financial rewards 
many of the ablest intellects of the world have always 
gladly given the best that was in them. 

The traditions of university Hfe have been slowly built 
up by generations of intellectual and more or less idealistic 
men, and may therefore count as a prophecy of the social 
life toward which the best in humanity is feeling its way. 
They also connect historically with the communistic com- 
munity ideals which we have just sketched. The medieval 
student bodies were molded on the model of the monastic 
communities. The stately colleges of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge have grown up around the common kitchen quite 
as much as around the lecture room. Without its demo- 
cratic and communistic elements every college would be 
stripped of its glow of affection. If our economic Hfe could 
be organized at all on the same basis, it would prolong the 
spirit of youth for us all, and initiate the working class 
into the dehght of teamwork, collective enthusiasm, and the 
combination of work and play. 

Thus the fundamental demands of a Christian economic 
order which we have laid down, justice, collective property 
rights, democracy, approximate equality, and cooperation, 
are nothing new-fangled. They are the basis on which all 
men of noble mind have sought to build the social organi- 
zations in which they were interested, and all communities 
that have made distinguished and permanent contributions 
to the social traditions of mankind have preserved and de- 
veloped these essential elements of social righteousness in 
some combination. The tyranny and covetousness of the 
strong have in the past held down or broken down the free 
development of fraternal democracy, so that only broken 
gleams of the Reign of God flash down to us from history. 
The question is if now at last the spiritual forces of humanity 
have gained enough conscious purpose and continuity of 
action to overcome the destructive forces of sin and found 
a fraternal commonwealth on the laws of God and Christ. 



CHAPTER VII 

'^THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE" 

We have seen that the social intuitions of the Christian 
spirit are confirmed and verified by history. Our fathers 
moved in the same direction as we. 

Our ethical foresight is also verified by the young Hfe of 
our own times. The new economic order is even now grow- 
ing up and maturing among us, and we can begin to discern 
its fundamental bent. 

Our age is like a family circle in which three generations 
are grouped around the same fireplace : the grandparents 
who ruled the past, the parents who are carrying the bur- 
dens of the present, and the children who are growing up 
to take their place. None of the three generations reaHzes 
how swiftly they are moving across the stage of hfe. So 
three economic orders are combining to make up the total 
of modern life : the precapitalistic which is passing away, 
the capitalistic which is in the flush of its strength, and the 
coUectivistic which is still immature. Most farmers, some 
mechanics, and many small business men are still to some 
extent living according to the methods and the spirit of the 
age before capitalism. Capitalism, both in its competitive 
and its monopolistic form, is dominating our business, our 
legislation, our institutions, and our thought, and thinks it 
always has been and always will be. But on all hands a 
new order is growing up, young, vigorous, and clamorous, 
eager to inherit the house and run it in its own way. 

Each of these three stages of social evolution is affected 
by the other two. None is able to express its peculiar spirit 

384 



"" THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE " 385 

and genius in logical severity and simplicity. But there 
is a deep difference discernible, not only between their 
economic methods, btit between their ethical spirit and their 
philosophy of life, and those social movements and organiza- 
tions which most distinctly belong to the future, most 
clearly embody the characteristics of the Christian economic 
order. This is another corroboration of our faith. I have 
no space for an extended study of the embryonic social 
organizations of the future order, but shall present a few 
evidences to back my claim. 

Few people in America, unless they have given special 
attention to the matter, as yet have any idea of the scope 
and importance of the modern cooperative associations. 
In Europe they have developed by thousands, especially 
since 1870.^ The network of these associations has become 
an economic and social fact of first-class importance, and 
in some countries, such as Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland, 
they have begun to change the economic and social character 
of the nation. There are cooperative retail stores, as- 
sociated in large wholesale associations which manufacture 
for their own market; building and loan associations to 
furnish cheap credit; purchasing associations to buy raw 
material for mechanics, or seeds, fertilizers, and agricultural 
implements for farmers ; societies to sell handicraft prod- 
ucts or market-garden truck and farm products; coop- 
erative mills, bakeries, slaughterhouses, creameries, cheese 
factories, and grain elevators. 

Their immediate aim is to save the middleman's profit 
for their members, to insure them clean and unadulterated 
goods and honest weights and measures, to save them from 
the parasitic trickery of the petty middleman and the usury 

^ Germany in 1908 had 24,652 cooperative societies with 3,658,437 mem- 
bers. Denmark with a population of only 2,500,000 had about 1200 retail 
stores, with 200,000 members, and has developed productive cooperation as 
no other country has. Basle with 125,000 inhabitants had 28,000 coopera- 
tive buyers. Since 1908 the figures have grown very much. 

2C 



386 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of the money shark who exploit the poor, to train their 
people to frugality by cash payments and small savings, 
and to secure for the working class and the lower middle 
class some share in social wealth and profit. Every co- 
operative association encounters the same initial difficul- 
ties as any other business concern. They have to meet the 
most efficient survivors of capitalistic competition. They 
usually start with little capital and less experience, a double 
lack that would almost certainly be fatal to an ordinary 
business undertaking. There have been many failures, 
especially at first before the conditions for success had been 
worked out by experience. In some fields of enterprise 
they have not succeeded. But taking them in the large, 
they have demonstrated their economic fitness just as con- 
vincingly as the corporation. Yet they rest on a different 
moral basis. 

The corporation is a product of the business class and 
takes its psychological coloring from that class. The co- 
operative is an organization of the earning classes, the in- 
dustrial workers, the small farmers, and the lower business 
class, and it draws its strength from their peculiar moral 
quahties. The corporation is an association of capital; 
money counts in it ; the members vote by the number of 
shares they hold; the small stockholder is practically a 
cipher in the management. The cooperative is an associa- 
tion of men ; one man has one vote, regardless of the num- 
ber of shares held. They have learned to appreciate the 
technical efficiency of salaried officers, but their directors 
give unpaid service for love of the cause, and the general 
business meeting of the members is the real power, at least 
in the smaller associations. ^^The number of bankrupt- 
cies and defalcations by directorates and officials is in- 
finitely smaller in the world of the cooperative associations 
than in the corporations and big private business concerns.'' ^ 

1 Schmoller, '' Volkswirtschaftslehre," I, 447. 



''the powers of the coming age" 387 

The capitalistic corporation is after profits ; its stockholders 
have no use for the goods they help to produce except as they 
earn profit; it accepts the brute struggle for existence as 
the law of business. The cooperative has a far stronger 
sense of humanity ; it thrives best where the sense of soli- 
darity is stoutest ; its abler members seek to lift the weaker 
with them as they rise to economic prosperity. They do 
try to save money ; they do not try to exploit men to make 
money. They refrain from taking business away from 
the ordinary dealer by cutting the market prices, though 
they might, in many cases, drive them out of business. 
They distribute the benefits to those who have made actual 
use of the cooperative plant, and according to the amount 
of use they have made of it. 

Thus the cooperative associations represent a new prin- 
ciple in economic life, clearly of higher ethical quality than 
the principle dominant in capitalism. They combine a 
wholesomely selfish desire to get ahead with genuine fra- 
ternal sympathy and solidarity, and the combination works 
and holds its own against the most efficient business con- 
cerns in those fields where the cooperatives have learned 
to master the situation. They have appropriated the busi- 
ness system and calculating keenness of capitalism, but 
they draw the lower classes whom capitalism has almost 
deprived of initiative into the management, and train them 
to industrial and moral efficiency. Their methods have 
been adapted from the joint stock company, but their 
spirit is drawn from the older communal organizations, 
from the new socialist hatred for exploiting methods, and 
from the depths of uncontaminated human nature. There 
is no prospect that the cooperative associations will dis- 
place capitalism, but they have a great future and no limit 
can be set to their possibiHties. They have proved what 
a fund of good sense and ability lies unused in the lower 
classes. They have demonstrated the economic efficiency 



388 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of fraternal cooperation. They are creating everywhere 
trained groups, capable of assuming larger responsibilities 
when the time comes, and a new spirit that can afford to 
look down on the exploiting spirit of capitalism. Thus the 
achievements of these humble cooperators are the begin- 
nings of a higher business morality. They are part of the 
newly forming tissue of a Christian social order and are 
one of '^the powers of the coming age.'' ^ 

The organizations of labor are also part of that new eco- 
nomic order which is growing up in the midst of capital 
ism. 

From some points of view the unions are just as brutally 
commercial in their tactics as any capitalistic corporation. 
They sell labor wholesale as others sell goods,^ and they 
seize every advantage of the market as shrewdly and ruth- 
lessly as any trust. But there are human and ethical 
values in trades-unionism which put them on a different 
footing, and explain the wonderful hold which the unions 
have on the loyalty of the elite of the working class. 

Wherever their influence reaches among the workers, 
they substitute the principle of solidarity for that of com- 
petitive selfishness. They train their members to stand 
together loyally and to sacrifice their private and immediate 
advantage for some larger benefit to be won for all. It is 
true, they seek the advantage only of their own group, and 
not directly of all society. But what class does? Few 
loyalties have been world wide. Even patriotism is a 
limited devotion, bounded by the nation. Christian love 
itself checks its pace when it crosses the threshold of its 
own particular Church. Why should we demand of one 
of the lowest classes, fighting on the borderland of poverty, 
an unselfish devotion to all society which the upper classes 

1 See Holyoke, " History of Cooperation in England " ; Beatrice Potter 
(Mrs. Sidney Webb), '' The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain''; 
Acland and Jones, '' Workingmen Cooperators"; Henry D. Lloyd, "La- 
bor Copartnership.'^ 



''the powers of the coming age'' 389 

have never shown? The group selfishness of the unions 
is at least a larger and nobler selfishness than that of the 
strike breaker whom the public sentiment of capitalism 
praises and rewards. The capitaKstic class finds it hard 
to understand the ethical value of the solidarity exhibited 
by organized labor, because commercial practices have 
fatally disintegrated its own capacity to stand together for 
similar sacrifices. 

When the unions demand a fixed minimum wage, a 
maximum working day, and certain reasonable conditions 
of labor as a security for health, safety, and continued 
efficiency, they are standing for human Hfe against prof- 
its. With capitalism the dollar is the unit of all calcula- 
tions ; with unionism it is life. With capitalism the main 
purpose of industry is to make as large a profit as possible, 
and it makes the margin of Hfe narrow in order to make the 
margin of profit wide. With unionism the purpose of in- 
dustry is to support as large a number of workingmen's 
families in comfort as possible. Capitalism and union- 
ism fail to understand each other because they revolve 
around a different axis. 

We have seen that the perversities of our economic order 
force the business men into false positions. The working- 
men are put in the wrong in the same way. Their noblest 
impulses often lead to actions that shock the moral judg- 
ment of outsiders. For instance, the sympathetic strike is 
condemned by law, by public opinion, and by the cautious 
prudence of the leaders of labor, yet the labor organizations 
are often quivering on the verge of it. And as a demon- 
stration of altruism and solidarity it is sublime. Like the 
charge of the six hundred at Balaklava, it is not war, but 
it is magnificent. Thousands of men and women giving 
up their job, their slender hold on subsistence, imperiling 
the bread and butter of their families for the sake of men 
in another trade with whom they have only a distant eco- 



390 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

nomic connection, simply to help their fellows in a fight 
which they feel to be their own, — where in the transac- 
tions of the business class, and where in church Hfe do we 
find such heroic self-sacrifice of great bodies of men and 
women for a common cause ? 

Organized labor is blamed for limiting the pace of work 
in a shop and restraining the capable workers from doing 
their best. It surely seems dishonest for a workman not 
to give his employer the best work that is in him, and it 
levels the standard of work down below the maximum of 
efiiciency. In a cooperative democracy of labor such a 
condition would indeed be against the common good and 
ethically intolerable, but as long as the workers are on the 
defensive against a superior force that seeks to get the maxi- 
mum of labor from them for the minimum of reward, this 
unnatural condition may actually be moral. The men know 
by bitter experience that in some shqps the pace set by 
the young and able is soon demanded of all and made com- 
pulsory by speeding up the machinery or cutting the' price 
of piecework. The few may gain if the capable do their 
best, but the mass would lose. The older and slower work- 
men could not keep up at all ; the strength of the others 
would be drained. Under such conditions the workers are 
in a moral dilemma, cornered between two wrongs or two 
duties. When they limit the pace of the capable, they en- 
force the law of solidarity : ^' Bear ye one another's burdens, 
and so fulfill the law of Christ." But with what right can 
the capitalist class blame them, which everywhere seeks to 
limit the output in order to maintain its monopoly prices? 
The Steel Trust fixing prices for all steel manufacturers by 
a gentleman's agreement, and a shop of workmen enforcing 
the ^'ca' canny" policy on all the men, are both doing the 
same thing. The Steel Trust does it to keep up its enormous 
profits. The workingmen do it to preserve their health 
against premature exhaustion, and in order to help the older 



" THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE '' 391 

men to hold their job. If there must be Hmitation of out- 
put, who has the better cause? 

Labor unions are fighting organizations, and fighting 
always abridges personal liberty and stiffens the demand for 
obedience and subordination. In the long fight of labor 
the odds are nearly always against it, sometimes enormously 
so. The employers have the tremendous backing of* prop- 
erty rights and the long wind given by large resources. 
The Law, which ought theoretically to be impartial, has 
always been made by the powerful classes. It used to 
treat the organization of workingmen as conspiracy, and 
still takes a grudging attitude toward demands which are 
clearly just. The battle of labor is fought by a few for all. 
Only a minority of the industrial workers is sufficiently 
strong economically, and sufficiently developed morally, 
to bear the strain of organized effort. Unorganized labor 
reaps the advantages of the sacrifices made by the unions, 
yet often thwarts their efforts and defeats the common 
cause. Bitterness, roughness, and violence are inevitable 
in such a conflict. * The danger of tyranny is real enough. 
But underneath the grime of battle is the gleam of a higher 
purpose and law which these men are seeking to obey and 
to bring to victory. They are standing for the growth of 
democracy, for earned against unearned income, for the 
protection of human weakness against the pressure of 
profit, for the right of recreation, education, and love, and 
for the solidarity of the workers. They doubtless sin, but 
even the errors of labor are lovable compared with the errors 
of capitalism. The seed of a new social order is in them. 
They too belong to ^'the powers of the coming age." 

The cooperative associations and the organizations of 
labor are practical efforts to secure immediate benefits for 
the persons who unite in these movements. Two other 
great movements, the Single Tax and Socialism, offer no 
direct advantage to their supporters. Each is a missionary 



392 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

movement and bears a gospel of social salvation to our 
capitalistic age. I point to them here as proof that the 
moral and spiritual convictions on which a new social order 
will have to be based are gaining force and are even now 
preparing that new order. 

^^AU the evils under which civilized people suffer can be 
traced back to private property in land as their cause.'' ^ 
All tyranny and exploitation is based on the control of the 
natural resources of the, earth. Whoever owns the earth 
can exploit the people who live on it. In our industrial 
era the increase and concentration of population have enor- 
mously increased land values and enabled the owners of the 
land to levy a tribute on the working population beyond 
compute. 

Wherever the demand for justice has become intelligent 
and thorough, it has included a demand for the restoration 
of the land to the people in some form. But a continuous, 
world-wide agitation, based on a scientific theory, and offer- 
ing a simple and practicable reform, has begun only with 
the man Henry George and his book, ^'Progress and Pov- 
erty." Editorial wiseacres still keep on informing us that 
the Henry George movement failed. God grant all good 
men such failure ! It failed in its first attempt to carry 
politics by storm, but it betook itself to the education of the 
public mind. Henceforth it distrusted party organization 
and put its faith in intellectual conviction. Its teachings 
dropped into the minds of the young and grew up with 
them. Now that the men who were young twenty-five 
years ago have come to maturity and influence, the teach- 
ings of Henry George are everywhere entering practical 
politics, though supported by the slenderest sort of organi- 
zation. The budget of Lloyd George in 1910, which pre- 
cipitated the constitutional revolution in England, was only 
the beginning of a movement to socialize the income from 

1 Zacharise, *^ Biicher vom Staat," 



''the powers of the coming age" 393 

the land, and it is well understood that radical land taxation 
will be the next great step in the social revolution going on 
in Great Britain. Since 1900 a number of cities in Germany 
have been taxing the unearned increment whenever land is 
sold, and the tax proved so simple, painless, and profitable 
that the Imperial Government has begun to draw on the 
same source for its revenues. New Zealand has a local 
option law in taxation under which nearly a hundred mu- 
nicipalities derive their local expenses from land values ex- 
clusively. The young cities of the Canadian Northwest 
are doing the same. In several of our older States move- 
ments are on foot to deal with the housing question by 
gradually shifting taxation from improvements to land 
values, thus forcing idle land into use and encouraging 
building. The whole procedure and administration of 
taxation has been deeply affected by the spread of Single 
Tax convictions. 

But this movement is not simply the propagation of a 
new tax device, but the proclamation of a new social order. 
It is the uncovering of the most fundamental form of un- 
earned wealth, and a democratic protest against the eco- 
nomic aristocracy built up on the unearned increment. 
Scratch a single-taxer and you find a genuine democrat who 
can be depended on to oppose all other forms of unjust 
privilege. Tom L. Johnson, who was won from the aimless 
acquisition of riches to the service of the people by the gos- 
pel of Henry George, applied the insight gained from the 
Single Tax doctrine to the knotty relations between the 
American municipahties and the pubHc service corpora- 
tions. He was only a conspicuous example of a new genera- 
tion of pubhc men whose souls and intellects have been 
saved from the vice of unearned money by that doctrine, 
and who are now occupied with the practical problems of 
political and economic democracy. The Single Tax move- 
ment ha$ not appealed to the working class as powerfully 



394 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

as Socialism, but it is a system of thought exactly adapted 
to middle-class intellectuals and to religious individualists. 
I owe my own first awakening to the world of social prob- 
lems to the agitation of Henry George in 1886, and wish here 
to record my lifelong debt to this single-minded apostle 
of a great truth. 

Socialism, on the other hand, has laid hold of the indus- 
trial working class with the grip of destiny. It promises 
these propertyless men that they shall once more own the 
tools of their work, share in the profit of their toil, take part 
in the management of their shop, and so escape from their 
insecurity and dependence. It holds out the hope that in 
the socialist commonwealth they shall plant the vineyard 
and eat of the fruit thereof ; they shall be full heirs of the 
science and art and education which they now labor to 
maintain, but into which, like Moses when he saw the Prom- 
ised Land afar, they cannot enter. 

Socialism always makes headway slowly at first. It 
requires hard thought. A man has to view all things from 
a new angle and revise all his maxims and value judgments. 
The leaders of the working class in any nation need a gen- 
eration to assimilate it, and after that they have the task 
of popularizing it for the masses. But it never goes back- 
ward, and no industrial nation can escape its influence. It 
trusts more to intellectual conviction and less to emotion 
than any great movement of our day. Socialists appeal 
to the theoretical and historical intellect with almost weari- 
some exclusiveness. In Milwaukee nine tenths of the party 
funds used to go for literature. The socialists are to-day 
the only preachers who love doctrinal preaching. Not since 
the days when Calvinism was convincing the intellect of 
northern Europe has any system of thought been expounded 
with such evangelistic zeal. 

The fact is that Socialism is the necessary spiritual prod- 
uct of Capitalism. It has been formulated by that class 



t\ 



"the powers of the coming age^^ 395 

which has borne the sins of CapitaHsm in its own body and 
knows them by heart. It stands for the holy determina- 
tion of that wronged and embittered class to eliminate 
those sins forever from the social life of mankind. Thus 
Socialism is the historical Nemesis of CapitaHsm and fol- 
lows it like its shadow. The only influence that can long 
seal the minds of the industrial working class against the 
doctrines of Socialism is the power of religion in the hands 
of a strong Church. That influence has created solid or- 
ganizations of nonsocialist workers in Europe. But social- 
ism seeps in, even there. If those Catholic federations of 
workingmen which resist Socialism in Germany were trans- 
ferred bodily to America, their presence would be felt as a 
tremendous reenforcement of the socialist drift in our 
trades- unionism. There is no way of taking the wind out 
of the sails of the socialist ship except to sail alongside of it 
and in the same direction. As a clever Irishman in Wis- 
consin puts it, ^^The only way to beat the socialists is 
to beat them to it." But when the enemies of a cause are 
compelled to aid it in order to oppose it, the stars in their 
courses are fighting against Sisera. The opponents of the 
Progressive Party in 191 2 called its platform socialism; 
Mr. Roosevelt called it a corrective of socialism; the 
Boston Common called it ^^an adaptation of the more im- 
minent teachings of socialism for middle-class neophytes," 
and added, ^^Out from among the lowly and despised once 
more has come a message of guidance for humanity." 

For the present argument the important fact is not the 
growing poHtical power of the sociaHsts, but the moral 
power of their cause. The Russian despotism also exerts 
vast political power, but that is in defiance of the conscience 
of mankind. Sociahsm appeals not only to the working 
class, but to the idealistic intellectuals. A great number 
of artists and literary men are sociaHsts at large. Many of 
the magazine writers and political leaders to whom we 



396 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

owe much of the present awakening are near-socialists. 
The same thing is true of the teaching profession and of 
social workers. An eminent banker, a former Secretary 
of the Treasury, said in an address to college alumni as 
early as 1909 : — 

^^I am alarmed at the trend toward socialism in this country 
to-day. If there is any power in this country to stem it, it 
ought to be the trained minds of college men. Four out of five 
commencement-day orations are purely socialistic. I have met 
many of the teachers of sociology in our schools and universities. 
With few. exceptions these teachers are socialists, though they 
hesitate to admit it and most of them will deny it. Uncon- 
sciously there is a great deal of socialism being taught in these 
days from the pulpit. The Chautauqua is also full of it. I 
do not recall a Chautauqua popular speaker who is not talking 
and teaching socialist doctrines. The trend of the news- 
papers is towards socialism, and, I repeat, the trend is dangerous 
to this country." 

Such a statement is correct only if we accept our defini- 
tion of socialism from the timidity of a banker. But it 
is interesting to see this man call on the college men to 
come to the rescue, and yet confess that the college men have 
gone over to the enemy. But if in any great historic move- 
ment the men of property are on one side and the young and 
idealistic intellects are on the other, on which side is God ? 

The religious idealists constitute a special variety of the 
intellectual class. In their case, the power of religion is 
added as a potent ingredient to their higher life. No one 
can deny that the ethical life of our religious leaders is 
deeply tinged with a diluted socialism. Wherever a man 
has the prophetic cast of thought, the broader moral out- 
look, and the tongue of fire, we can discover clear affinity 
for socialist ideas. Those men who have kept their mental 
balance against the dogmatism of the cruder type of social- 
ism, who have guarded the purity of their life against the 



'' THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE " 397 

looseness of modern morals, who have cherished the devout- 
ness of intimate reUgion in the drought of skepticism, but 
who have also absorbed the socialist analysis of our col- 
lective sins and the sociaHst hope of a fraternal democracy, 
stand as a class marked by God as his own. The best of 
them belong to ''that small transfigured band whom the 
world cannot tame." 

Religious men are forced into a tragic dilemma when they 
face organized Socialism. On the one hand they realize 
in its ideas the most thorough and consistent economic 
elaboration of the Christian social ideal. It is far and 
away the most powerful force for justice, democracy, and 
organized fraternity in the modern world. On the other 
hand, these moral elements are fused with an alloy that is 
repellent to their Christian instincts. 

There are religious people who are not Christians. Their 
sympathies are not with the common people, but with the 
parasitic classes. They do not trust in freedom, but want 
a strong Church to lay down the law to the common man. 
If Jesus appeared in modern dress among such people, 
they would not know what to do with him. To such per- 
sons, of course, Socialism is horrid. I am not concerned 
for them. I speak for men who have drawn their economic 
insight from Socialism, and their democracy and moral 
ardor from Jesus himself, and who yet find it hard to co- 
operate whole-heartedly with party sociaHsm as they 
actually find it. 

When they attend socialist meetings, they encounter a 
rougher, directer, more dogmatic, more acrimonious tone 
of discussion than they are used to in gatherings of the 
educated classes. Also an entire absence of respect for 
many of their conventional objects of respect. But if 
they have the right stuff in them, they will get used to it 
and even come to like it as a proof of unvarnished sincerity 
and profound interest in the subject. But they will also 



398 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

find an almost universal attitude of suspicion and dislike 
against the Church, which often rises to downright hate 
and bitterness, and expands to general antagonism against 
religion itself. The materialistic philosophy of history as 
the average socialist expounds it, emphasizes the economic 
and material factors of life so exclusively that the spiritual 
elements of humanity seem as unimportant as the coloring 
of a flower or the bloom on the grape. In large parts of 
the party literature the social and economic teachings of 
Socialism are woven through a web of materialistic phi- 
losophy, which is part of ^'scientific Socialism.'' The party 
platform declares religion to be a private affair, but that 
declaration of neutrality does not exclude persistent attacks 
on religion by official exponents of the party. The prac- 
tical deductions drawn from materialistic philosophy and 
from historical conceptions of the family, have combined 
with modern impatience of moral restraints to create in 
some of the intellectuals of the party loose views of sex life 
against which all the instincts of Christian training warn 
as poisonous. 

If a Christian man sees the good in Socialism and identi- 
fies himself with the organized movement, he is suspected 
of atheism, free love, and red-handed violence, and he can- 
not repudiate that charge against his party friends as mere 
slander. A man of mature religious convictions may dis- 
criminate between the economic doctrines of Socialism, 
which are its essential, and the philosophical teachings, which 
are an adventitious historical taint of it. But others, who 
may be drawn into the party through his influence, may 
not be able to keep the two things apart. 

Socialist leaders in America have committed an enormous 
tactical mistake in allowing Socialism to be put in antago- 
nism to Christianity. Why should they permit some of 
their agitators to go out of their way to belie the neutrality 
promised by the party platform ? Why should they erect 



THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE '' 399 

a barb-wire fence between the field of Socialism and Chris- 
tianity which makes it hard to pass from one to the other ? 
Organized Christianity represents the largest fund of 
sobriety, moral health, good will, moral aspiration, teach- 
ing abihty, and capacity to sacrifice for higher ends, which 
can be found in America. If Sociahsts will count up the 
writers, lecturers, and organizers who acquired their power 
of agitation and moral appeal through the training they got 
in church hfe, they will reahze what an equipment for 
propaganda Hes stored in the Christian churches. As soon 
as the SociaHst party came to the point of being able to 
elect mayors and city officials, it found that Christian 
ministers somehow made up a large percentage of the men 
elected, which seems to argue that they have capacities 
that are not wholly contemptible. Many SociaHst leaders 
misread the situation in America because they are obsessed 
by theories developed in Europe on the basis of the bad 
experience which Democracy has had with the Roman 
Catholic Church and with the Protestant State Churches. 
They know too little of religious history to be aware that 
rehgion is a very different thing in England and America 
where it has been loved and sustained for centuries by the 
free sacrifices of the plain people in their own little religious 
democracies. The autocratic Churches of Europe have 
long done their best to suppress any spontaneous religious 
movements of the common man, and have succeeded very 
well in making personal religious experience almost unknown 
in large sections of the population. In England and 
America millions of the people have experienced the power 
of religion in their own lives, and when Socialism under- 
takes to pull up Christianity, it will find it rooted deeper 
than in Europe. Surely Socialism has its job cut out for 
it in overthrowing Capitalism. Why should it force into 
the hostile camp the multitude of Christian men who are 
so close to it in their moral point of view ? In England the 



400 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

best leaders of the Labor Party are Christian men and 
active church workers. The leaders of German Socialism 
are at a loss to understand a situation where Christian men 
can be also avowed Socialists. But that proves that the 
continental leaders are unfit to guide the policies of Ameri- 
can Socialism. If Socialist philosophy does not reckon 
with the actual facts of social life, it is not ^'scientific/' 
but a stock of imported misinformation. 

As long as SociaHsm was an intense insistence on a few 
fundamental doctrines, and was upheld by a small body 
of minds bent on driving these doctrines home, it is compre- 
hensible that the religious desires and emotions of the human 
soul were slighted or forgotten. But the more SociaHsm 
aspires to become a rounded expression of all sound and 
wholesome human life, and the more it embodies the great 
masses of humanity, the more sectarian and narrow-minded 
will the traditional contempt for religion become. Jaures, 
the brilliant French Socialist leader, heralds a broader 
view : ^'I believe it would be wearisome and even fatal "to 
stifle the aspirations of the human conscience. I do not 
believe at all that the material and social life sufhce for 
man. We want him to be able to rise to a religious concep- 
tion of life by means of science, reason, and freedom. The 
hour has come for democracy no longer to mock or out- 
rage the ancient faiths, but to seek whatever they contain 
that is living and true and can abide in an emancipated and 
broadened human conscience.'' ^ 

1 Paul Sabatier, in his "L'Orientation Religieuse de la France Actuelle " 
(p. 38), tells an interesting anecdote. At a great church festival in Lyon, 
at which all the bishops of southeastern France were present, the bishop 
who had preached the sermon was receiving the compliments of ladies and 
priests at a dinner. He told them he had just read one of the most beauti- 
ful sermons he had ever read in his life, and begged permission to read them 
extracts. When he finished, all demanded the name of the preacher. He 
asked them to guess. They ran through the list of the celebrated preachers 
of France, but in vain. At last he announced that it was an address by 
— Jaures. 



'' THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE '' 401 

The Socialists are not nearly as unbelieving as some of 
them try to make us beHeve. Their theories may make 
everything turn on ^'economic class interests''; they may 
scoff at moral ideals, and insist that it is all a ^'stomach 
question" ; but they appeal to men to act contrary to their 
economic interests on behalf of humanity, and they them- 
selves labor with a moral enthusiasm and a power of self- 
sacrifice which look most suspiciously Kke religion. ^^ Noth- 
ing in the present day is so likely to awaken the conscience 
of the ordinary man or woman, or to increase the sense of 
individual responsibiHty, as a thorough course in sociaUsm. 
The study of socialism has proved the turning-point in 
thousands of lives, and converted self-seeking men and 
women into self-sacrificing toilers for the masses. The 
impartial observer can scarcely claim that the Bible pro- 
duces so marked an effect upon the daily, habitual life of 
the average man and woman who profess to guide their 
conduct by it, as sociaKsm does upon its adherents. The 
strength of sociaKsm in this respect is more like that of 
early Christianity as described in the New Testament." ^ 
Jesus surprised the religious people of his day by telling 
them that the publicans and harlots had more religion 
than they. Between a church member who lifts no hand 
against commercial inhumanity because it would ^^hurt 
business," and an atheist who endangers his position and 
consumes his energies in fighting it, we might be in doubt 
who of the two really believes in God. 

Time and experience will balance the philosophy of 
SociaKsm. No great mass movement in history was ever 
free from one-sidedness and error. When Christianity 
was pervading the pagan world of Rome, it feared and 
repudiated art, because art had grown up in the service of 
paganism and seemed inseparable from it. But in time the 
Church became the great patron of art. In the Reforma- 

^ Professor R. T. Ely, "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 145. 

2D 



402 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

tion the Protestant minority was wrought to such a. fighting 
pitch that it hated the entire CathoHc Church as anti- 
christian and deviKsh, and the Puritans cleared their 
churches of music and art because CathoHcism had stamped ' 
them with its spirit. That dogmatic intolerance of a 
young movement fighting against the overwhelming pres- 
sure of an older social force is duplicated in Socialism 
to-day. Religion bears the stamp of the older epoch in 
which it was developed, and Socialism treats the Church 
as the Church treated pagan art and philosophy, and fears 
its gifts as Protestantism fears Catholicism. This seems 
intolerable, but it is human. While a movement is fluid 
and plastic, it takes the impress of its first environment 
and casts its doctrines and institutions in that mold. 
Jewish apocalypticism, Persian demonology, and Greek 
philosophy saturated early Christian thought and seemed 
part of the essence of Christianity to the early Church 
Fathers. Calvinism was molded by the stern, keen mind 
of John Calvin and by the civic institutions of Switzerland 
and proclaimed these equipments as part of the eternal 
gospel. Compared with the tenacity with which religion 
clings to its early prejudices or superstitions, SociaHsm 
has shown a very sweet reasonableness in the speed with 
which it has left some things behind. 

To me the greatest danger seems to lie in the loss of that 
teachableness. When I try to look at SociaHsm as coming 
centuries may look back at it, I fear the solidity of the 
Socialist parties and the intensity of their party spirit. 
An organization created for fighting purposes does not melt 
away when the fighting is done, but its maintenance be- 
comes an end in itself and therewith the organization 
becomes a drag on social progress. The history of the 
Republican Party and the useless perpetuation of many of 
our religious sects prove that. Pure love of the truth and 
independent thought do not flourish in the midst of party 



^^ THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE " 403 

spirit. The internal history of Sociahsm shows how quickly 
a narrow and jealous orthodoxy springs up within the party 
and forbids the prompt assimilation of larger knowledge. 
Important sections of the party fear ^^the intellectuals/' 
just as religious sects have feared their educated men. I 
realize that Sociahsm needs a steel edge to cut through 
the obstacles that confront it, and only party loyalty, 
party dogmatism, and even party hatred can temper that 
edge, but I wish the coming generations could be spared 
what we are preparing for them. Whoever solidifies the 
opposition to Socialism, inevitably solidifies Socialist party 
spirit, and when it is a church that does it, it solidifies 
Socialist irreligion. The Roman Catholic Church laments 
and despises the sectarian divisions of Protestantism, but 
it is itself chiefly responsible for them. Its arrogance, its 
egotism, its refusal to be reformed by anything except the 
sledge-hammer blows of the Almighty's chastisement, neces- 
sitated the agonies that bled Christendom white and con- 
solidated the reforming elements into fighting bodies which 
still perpetuate the dead issues of that fight after four 
centuries. Socialism inevitably involves a menace. It is 
our business to make its menace small and its blessing great. 
Aside from the dangers involved in party orthodoxy we 
may safely trust that Socialism will slough off its objection- 
able elements as it matures. Those qualities against 
which the spirit of genuine Christianity justly protests are 
not of the essence of Socialism. The loose views of mar- 
riage in some individuals are largely a bacterial contagion 
contracted from the outside.^ The materialism of the 
Socialist philosophy of history is the result of throwing 
a great truth out of balance; Christian doctrine, too, has 
often been one-sided by overemphasis of some truth. 
Atheism is in no way essential to Socialist thought. Social- 
ists have no monopoly of it. It was the popular philosophy 

1 See Part IV, Chapter IV, of this book. 



404 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of continental liberalism in the '50 Vand '6o's, and the leaders 
of the working class absorbed it as true ^'science/' Chris- 
tianity was the religion of the possessing classes and was 
used as a spiritual force to hold down Socialism; conse- 
quently revolutionary thought seized the philosophy that 
seemed most effectively to maul Christianity.^ The 
Socialists found the Church against them, and thought 
God was against them too. They have had to do God's 
work without the sense of. God's presence to hearten 
them. When a great moral movement has been infected 
with dogmatic unbelief, partly through the sin of the 
European churches, shall we back away from it in fear, or 
have we confidence enough in our own religion to take part 
in it? Can we prove in our own personality that the 
highest type of Socialism is that which combines the 
economic intelligence and political force of Socialism with 
the character and faith created by religion? 
. Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever 
the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools 

^ Professor Werner Sombart, " Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung," p. 91, 
thinks the hostility of the proletarian movement against religion has a 
theoretical and a practical cause. The theoretical cause is that Socialism 
in its youth absorbed the bald atheism which was the philosophy of the semi- 
educated classes in the middle of the nineteenth century. This dogmatic 
atheism is now definitely outgrown by science. "No serious representative 
of science will to-day dare to assert that science demands atheism or excludes 
religion." Therefore the proletariat would now be free to come out of 
the atheistic dogmatism into which it backed up. But practical causes still 
keep it there. The enthusiasm for unbelief was caused by the feeling that 
the philosophy of materialism was a mighty revolutionary explosive, fit to 
break the hold of the existing authorities. It opposed the Christian phi- 
losophy of the ruling classes. "For no one ought to be in doubt that in 
the great majority of cases official Christianity was utilized by the ruling 
classes against the proletarian movement for greater liberty. The fate in- 
flicted on dissenting Christians is the best proof for that. As long as mon- 
archy and capitalism are defended as divine institutions, every social 
movement of our day had to turn against the church and against religion." 
He adds that these causes will disappear as soon as Christianity takes a 
neutral position, or becomes friendly to Socialism. 



^^THE POWERS OF THE COMING AGE '^ 405 

in the hands of the Almighty. They must serve him 
whether they will or not. ^^He maketh the wrath of man 
to praise him, and the remainder of wrath he turneth aside.'' 
Whatever tares grow in the field of Socialism the field was 
plowed and sown by the Lord, and he will reap it. Social- 
ism is one of the chief powers of the coming age. Its 
fundamental aims are righteous, not because they are 
socialistic, but because they are human. They were part 
of the mission of Christianity before the name of SociaHsm 
had been spoken. God had to raise up Socialism because 
the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize 
God's ends. The Socialist parties, their technical terms, 
and their fighting dogmas will pass away into ancient history 
when their work is done. The only thing that will last and 
the only thing that matters is the Reign of God in humanity, 
and the Reign of God is vaster and higher than Socialism. 
The great danger is that our eyes will be bhnded by eccle- 
siastical prejudices so that we do not know God when he 
comes close to us. The Jewish Church had the sacred book 
and the heritage of the prophets. Yet when He came who 
fulfilled the law and the prophets, they turned against him. 
He was identified with publicans and sinners, and he seemed 
to overthrow morality and rehgion. 



PART VI 
THE METHODS OF ADVANCE 

CHAPTER I 

THE PACE OF ADVANCE 

In Part V of this book we have tried to chart the course 
for our effort by laying down the main Hnes of direction, 
drawing our wisdom as best we could from the teachings of 
Jesus Christ, from the general convictions of the Christian 
conscience, from the common consent of the best social 
groups of the past, and from the bent of the most prophetic 
movements of the present. 

I should be glad to stop here and leave the practical 
application of these Christian principles to every man's 
conscience. A man who has his eye on God and his hand 
on his job ought to know better than any one else how he 
can make room for more righteousness in and around the 
place where he stands. But I know by experience how men 
love definiteness. There is at present more honest will to 
^^do something" than clear understanding of what is to 
be done. So I shall try to explain in these closing chapters 
what practical methods seem to me indispensable in bring- 
ing about the fundamental regeneration of our social order. 
The reader must remember that it is not my business here 
to enumerate all the constructive philanthropies which 
help individuals and social classes,^ but to state the prac- 

1 The regular weekly reading of the Survey ($2 a year) will give an 
education to any man or woman who wants to follow with sympathetic 

406 



THE PACE OF ADVANCE 407 

tical steps by which the social order itself can be put on a 
more Christian basis. 

But first a word about the pace of advance. The pace 
has been slow enough to sicken faith; so slow that some 
have doubted if there is any real advance at all, or if man- 
kind is trapped like a squirrel in a cage, treading the wheel 
of vain endeavor. Inevitably movements arise again and 
again which try to hasten the pace of the governing classes 
by putting the fear of death on them or to block the ma- 
chinery of society by destructive action. If we belonged 
to the class that suffers, we might do the same. If we saw 
our wives compelled to leave the home and toil in the shop 
and our children slipping down into vicious temptations 
amid tenement-house Hfe; if we felt our strength prema- 
turely drained and our years sHpping away without ever 
bringing us the full taste of Hfe; if we realized that our 
loved ones were in want only to give additional luxuries 
to some who already surfeit ; and if all this came home to 
us with the intimacy of persistent torture, — we too might 
try whether the hiss of fear would not bring to reason those 
who refuse to Hsten to the calm voice of justice or pity. 

Recent events have already thrown the shadow of 
social terrorism across the future of our country. It is 
certain to come, for America itself breeds it. All classes 
of society in our country are swift to take justice into their 
own hands and to invoke the awful arbitrament of Death. 
The prevalence of brutal lynching ; the slugging and dyna- 
miting of labor struggles; the ^^ strong arm'' methods and 
*^ third degree" of the poHce; the prompt cry of corpora- 
tions for Pinkertons, constabulary, militia, and regulars, 
— it is all the same spirit of raw and untamed Hfe. When 
that same American spirit meets us in some revolutionary 

intelligence what is actually being done for the protection and salvation of 
the weak. If a man reads the Bible and the Survey, he ought to find sal- 
vation. 



4o8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

organization of the working class, standing at bay, may we 
remember that we are all jointly responsible for it and find 
some wiser answer to violence than violence. 

I do not hold that the use of force against oppression 
can always be condemned as wrong. Americans are 
estopped from denying the right of revolution, for our 
nation was founded by revolutionary methods, employed 
too by a minority of the population for class purposes. The 
test of brute strength is the ultima ratio when all higher 
arguments have proved vain. The great Roman historian 
expressed the general conviction of nations: ^^War is just 
for those for whom it is necessary, and arms are holy 
for those to whom no hope is left except in arms.'' ^ Quiver- 
ing fear has sometimes sobered mortals drunk with power 
and self-will, and restored their lost sense of humanity. 
But the sight of blood is quite as apt to rob men of their 
reason as to bring them to reason. The ruling classes in 
the past have never been more murderously cruel than when 
they were panic-stricken. The game of organized violence 
is the game they can play best. The Socialists in Germany 
are careful to abstain from any show of violence, for the 
government knows all their leaders, and on the first pretext 
of public safety would close the dragnet, stand them up 
against a wall, and so scoop the brain out of the Socialist 
movement. The old days of hand-to-hand fighting are 
gone, and no streets were ever less adapted for barricades 
than American streets. 

Moreover, if a sudden rising did put a revolutionary 
movement in control, the real difficulties would still be 
ahead of the leaders. They must make the revolution 
succeed in a week, or it will be thrown back for years. 
When every household was an independent economic 
enterprise, stocked with supplies in barn, cellar, and attic, 

1 Livy : " Justum bellum, quibus necessarium, et pia arma, quibus nulla 
nisi in armis relinquitur spes," 



THE PACE or ADVANCE 409 

a nation could bear political disturbance for months. Our 
cities live from hand to mouth. Any break in the complex 
machinery that feeds them would plunge New York or 
Chicago into a famine, and that would be fatal to any party 
that caused it. 

Force always seems a short cut to the promised land. 
In reaHty it may be the longest way of all. Whoever 
figures out the time-table of progress must count in the 
long reactions that follow force. The idea that violence 
can suddenly estabhsh righteousness is just as Utopian as 
the idea that moral suasion can suddenly estabhsh it. 
Wherever workingmen have had a chance to gain experi- 
ence by the practical handling of power, they have ceased 
putting their hope in force and have settled down to a 
slow climb. Socialist thought represents the widest and 
most continuous body of revolutionary thinking, and its 
development has been steadily away from faith in sudden- 
ness. As compared with the Utopian socialism that pre- 
ceded it, Marxian socialism is a great philosophy of patience, 
and in so far as scientific socialist thought of late has moved 
beyond Marx, it has further abandoned the expectation 
of a breakdown of society and accepted a program of 
evolutionary tactics. The great body of the Sociahst 
Party has no desire for a force revolution. The revolutions 
of kings against the people far outnumber in history the 
revolutions of the people against the kings. The danger 
of a force movement with us will come when the great 
interests feel that their control of the pohtical and mihtary 
power is sKpping away from them. Then they will use a 
coup d^etat to snatch the rightful control from the popular 
movement and thus will force the people to fight. As soon 
as the Republican Party elected Lincoln, the slave oli- 
garchy forced secession. 

But this call to patience is not for those who are at ease, 
especially not for those who are in any sense the benefi- 



4IO CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

ciaries of our wrongs. Let us ''go slow/' but let us hurry 
up about it. The capacity of the nation to throw off in- 
justice and go through a social transformation is lessening 
in many ways. Wherever the physical and moral stamina 
of any portion of our people is breaking down, the active 
forces of health are weakened and new toxic forces are 
generated in our national organism. When all the intel- 
lectual professions have taken the bit into their mouth as 
tamely as the lawyers have done, who will lead us ? The 
relative decline of church life means a lessening of the fear 
of God and of all religious motives throughout our people. 
Our nation is losing its youthful elasticity and crossing the 
dead hne of middle age. Young communities always have 
an immense advantage in social progress. To-day the 
banner of economic and political freedom is fluttering most 
bravely in New Zealand, Oregon, Vancouver, and Arizona. 
Some of the progressive qualities of American life in the 
past were due to the rawness of our continent and the youth 
of our social organization quite as much as to any spiritual 
convictions about freedom and justice. But now the 
Western frontier and its glorious race of rebels is disap- 
pearing forever. The present insurgent movement in the 
Western States may be the last great rising of the old Ameri- 
can spirit. If that fails, we must look to the new Americans 
who are coming to us with the social rebellion of the old 
world in their hearts. So this is no time to put on the 
brakes, but to stoke the fires. 

The doctrine of gradualness may be overworked. It is 
true enough that the capacity of the social organism to 
adapt itself to change has been very limited in past periods, 
but it has grown immensely within the last four centuries 
and again in the last four decades. Society in the past 
would not move because those in power did not want it to 
move, and the people had so little chance to think and act 
together that their forward push was spasmodic and in- 



THE PACE OF ADVANCE 41I 

effective. To-day the area of popular intelligence has 
widened; the means of common action have improved; 
progress has become fairly continuous. Rehgious dogma- 
tism and superstition, which used to lubricate the axis of 
progress with rubber cement, has lost some of its strength. 
PoHtical power is still in the hands of selfish interests, but 
democracy has put the levers where the people can reach 
them whenever they need them badly. Reformers are at 
least no longer hurled down the Tarpeian Rock or burned 
by the Inquisition. Every position captured by the people 
is a point of vantage for the next move. 

This is not an affair of legislators and public men alone. 
When the social body has to rebuild its diseased tissue, 
every cell must do its part, and every leucocyte should 
keep its eyes open to arrest and swallow alien microbes. 
Every honest man and woman and every wholesome social 
group is needed. For instance, public school-teachers have 
no business to use their position for partisan agitation ; yet 
nothing would so aid the christianizing of the social order 
as to have all teachers enlightened with a mature under- 
standing of the essentials of social righteousness. No 
matter how just a social change may be, the social class 
affected by it will resist it. The reluctant class must be 
shouldered along the ways of wisdom by the other classes 
whose selfishness may be equally great, but is not called 
into activity by this particular issue. Business is the 
unsaved part of the social order. It is reluctant to be 
saved, yet salvation would be a blessing to it. The saved 
portions of the social order must stand together in the con- 
sciousness of moral and religious superiority and go after 
the lost Brother. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CONSERVATION OF LIEE 

We charged our industrial system with mammonism. 
Industry ought to exist for the support of Hfe; actually 
it exists to make money, and it is in constant danger of 
sacrificing the life of the many to the profits of the few.^ 
All the powers of Christianity should react against this 
irrational and immoral perversion of the great organization 
of society. The conservation of life is the first duty of 
every Christian factor of the social order. But the most 
insidious enemy against which life at present needs protec- 
tion is the insatiability of industry. 

In every attempt to build firmer shelter for the weak 
against industrial exploitation we encounter the legal and 
economic doctrine of ^^ freedom of contract." No State 
in this country, for instance, has yet been allowed by the 
courts to establish a legal minimum wage in private em- 
ployments, however sweated they may be, because that 
would violate the right to ^^ freedom of contract." That 
doctrine was introduced into law by Capitalism and is one 
of its chief legal supports. Imagine a man who has been 
out of work for six weeks. His baby is sick, his credit at 
the grocery exhausted. He has stood in line with fifty 
other men, and his heart is in his throat when the foreman 
passes him in. He may not know that eleven hours are a 
day's work in this shop, and that skilled hands rarely make 
more than $9.20 a week. He would take the job on almost 
any terms; he has to. But the law calls this procedure 

1 Part IV, Chapter II, of this book. 
412 



THE CONSERVATION OF LIFE 413 

a contract, and it protects the man's 'liberty" to take as 
low a wage as he wants. Between equals and in theory 
this may be equity ; in practice it is iniquity. 

We have broken with a good many orthodoxies; we 
shall have to break with this legal orthodoxy of Capitalism. 
We do not allow the workman the freedom to commit 
sudden suicide ; why should we allow him to commit slow 
suicide ? We do not allow another man to maim him with 
a club, even in a free fight ; why should we allow a corpora- 
tion to drain him with overwork, even in a free contract ? 
The police powers of the State ought to be enough to cover 
the case as soon as we have judges who know as much on 
the bench as the man on the street. The self-interest of 
the community also demands interference. The diseases 
of the workingman, his immoralities, the children he breeds 
in his fatigue, and the poverty of his premature age are 
thrown on the community. Above all, the Christian 
doctrine of the brotherhood of man and of the value of life 
make this legal fiction of free contract an intolerable fraud. 

Our first concern is for the weak. ^^ Women and chil- 
dren first !" This law of the sea is the law of Christianity 
and of evolution, for women and children stand for the 
future of the race. We cannot afford to have bright-eyed 
children transformed into lean, sallow, tired, hopeless, 
stupid, and vicious young people, simply to enable some 
group of stockholders to earn 10 per cent. The absolute 
prohibition of factory labor for children under fourteen; 
the limitation of labor to eight hours for children under 
eighteen ; the exclusion of the young from night labor and 
from hazardous and poisonous employments, — are the 
minimum which the industry of the richest country in the 
world, amid the technical efficiency of the twentieth cen- 
tury, ought to be able to afford.^ 

^ In this chapter I accept the "Social Standards for Industry" formulated 
by the Conunittee on Standards of Living and Labor of the National Con- 



414 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Women, too, demand special protection because life 
springs from their bodies. They alone can exercise the 
sacred function of maternity, which is higher than the 
production of goods. Their capacity to bear and rear 
sound children is the most important physical asset of the 
race. Pregnant women should not be allowed to toil under 
the incessant strain of shopwork. Nursing the child with 
her own milk is part of a mother's duty to God, who made 
her breast the only fountain of pure and fit food for the babe. 
To take the sucking child from its mother's breast and har- 
ness her to a machine seems an indecency. For all women 
the hours of steady labor must be limited ; night work and 
hazardous employment must be eliminated ; and we must 
see that these measures designed for their protection do not 
push the women of the poor farther into starvation. 

What the hours of labor in the cooperative common- 
wealth may come to be, we do not know. For the pres- 
ent an eight-hour day and a rest of forty consecutive hours 
at the week-end are the ideal of organized labor. The 
maximum working-day and the living wage together mean 
the chance to live. The living wage will vary as to dollars 
and cents, but it must be enough not only for a lonely man 
in a boarding house, but for the father of an average family, 
who keeps his family in a sanitary home, provides nourish- 
ing food, sends his children to school till they are sixteen, 
and saves or insures himself against sickness and old age. 
The wage scales of employers should be on file for pubhc 
purposes like the statistics of public health. Minimum 
wage boards should be established in every state to deter- 
mine the standard that can be sanctioned as a minimum.^ 

ference of Charities and Corrections, of which I had the honor to be a member. 
The literature on the questions which I touch here is too immense to quote. 
Those who have no time for thorough study will find the digest of information 
in the report of that Committee (191 2, 48 pp.) full of valuable material. 

^ Such boards are in operation in the Australian States ; England estab- 
lished them in 19 10; Germany has provided for them; other countries are 



i 



THE CONSERVATION OF LIFE 415 

Where wages are paid according to weight or tally of work, 
the workers and the public through their representatives 
should have the right to inspect the instruments and 
methods of accounting, just as the customer and the public 
have a right to inspect the weights and measures in a store. 

Modern machine work both multiplies the dangers of 
accident and lessens the ability of the individual to protect 
himself adequately. Its dangers are social; it demands 
social protection. The community must act for its mem- 
bers. It must prevent unnecessary crippling and occu- 
pational diseases by standardized regulations imposed on 
all employers by law and enforced by competent inspectors, 
whose character, intelligence, and social sympathies must 
be satisfactory to the working class on whose behalf they 
act. To keep a scientific record of the injuries and diseases 
incident to labor should be one of the prime intellectual 
functions of the organized community, and a high per- 
centage of human wastage should bring any employer or 
trade under public scrutiny and reprimand, just as unusual 
breakage and wastage of goods would cause the dismissal 
of an employee. A high rate of accidents raises the pre- 
sumption of technical inefficiency and moral callousness. 

When accident and occupational disease do occur, it is 
unfair and inhuman to throw the financial loss on the 
suffering family, or to put the burden of legal proof on them, 
and to waste a large part of the damages they may secure 
on lawyer's fees and court expenses. Either the industry 
employing the man, or the whole community, should 
support the man during his disabihty or compensate his 
family in case of death, so that they will not be sucked 
into the quicksands of pauperism by their disaster. Since 
Germany has begun to protect her working people against 
the ravages of absolute poverty in such times of distress, 

preparing to do so. Practically all continental countries have industrial 
courts to which aggrieved workmen can appeal. 



41 6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

her industrial life has been built on solid foundations. 
Childbirth is the professional period of danger for house- 
wives, and if their family resources are not sufficient to secure 
them rest and care, the community has enough at stake in 
their welfare to arrange for their care in maternity hospitals, 
and if necessary to provide by some form of insurance or 
pension for the extra expenses of the lying-in period. 

The care of the aged, where they are not sheltered by 
the family institution, is one of the unsolved problems of 
our national life. Our communities have handed over 
their resources to individuals for exploitation, and our 
privately owned industries do almost nothing for their 
workers when they have passed their prime. They should 
be saved from the stagnation of idling in a poorhouse. 
As long as they have some capacity for work and any 
desire for work, they ought to have that sense of worth 
which goes with productive work, and should earn some 
part of their support without the drive and strain of wage 
labor. To organize the industry of the handicapped by 
furnishing them material for light labor in their homes, or 
by locating them in rural colonies and putting them in 
touch with the soil, is one of the tasks that awaits Chris- 
tian social initiative in most of our communities. 

The proper housing of the people is essential to the con- 
servation of their life. The campaign against tuberculosis 
has taught us that it is possible to kill people with a tene- 
ment as neatly as with a stiletto. Lack of air and sunshine 
bleach the blood and darken life. An investigation in 
Berlin some years ago showed that the death rate for 
families occupying one room was 163.5 P^^ thousand, for 
families occupying two rooms 22.5, three rooms 7.5, and 
four rooms or more 5.4 per thousand.^ The poor pay a 
larger proportion of their income for rent than others and 
get more death for it. 

^ Jacob A. Riis, "Charities and the Commons," Vol. XVIII, p. 77. 



THE CONSERVATION OF LIFE 417 

The most simple and immediate remedy for a shortage 
of homes is to tax land and untax houses. Our tax on 
houses has checked their production ; a higher tax on vacant 
lots would stimulate building. A vacant lot should be 
taxed as high as any other lot of equal site value. It repre- 
sents an opportunity granted by the community to the 
owner ; if he cannot make use of it, let him sell it to one 
who can. To keep land vacant for speculation in a crowded 
city is a form of immorality about which we must develop 
a conscience. ^^Any one who speculates in real estate 
ought not to enjoy the general respect of his fellow-men." ^ 

The housing problem is a big thing that can be handled 
economically only in a large way. Capitalism is manifestly 
failing to provide the kind of houses that are most needed. 
The situation calls for community action. Moreover land- 
lordism is one of the most active forms of exploitation. If 
tenants increase their thrift or cities beautify the neighbor- 
hood, the landlord increases his rent. On the other hand, 
he will make no improvement in the quality of working- 
men's homes until it is forced on him by law. If munici- 
pal governments considered the landed interests less and 
the poorer class of tenants more, the barometer of Chris- 
tianity would rise. 

The conservation of physical life and health is only the 
basis for the conservation of the real thing, — the per- 
sonaHty and manhood of men. Our so-called individualism 
blunts the individuality of millions by the monotony of 
machine labor, and the docile regimentation of the workers. 
The more specialized and monotonous labor is, the more do 
the workers need leisure, recreation, and educational and 
artistic stimulus to balance it. The more modern industry 
calls for the subordination of all to a single will, the more 

^ A remark made at the fourteenth annual session of the Evangelisch- 
Soziale Kongress in Germany by Professor Wagner, one of the most eminent 
economists of Germany. 

2E 



4l8 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

does it need the self-respect of democracy to keep the soul 
of men erect within them. In the Sermon on the Mount, 
Jesus revised and expanded the moral standards of his 
nation. The current law forbade murder and made killing 
justiciable in the common court. Jesus pushed up the 
whole schedule of crimes, and made it an offense justiciable 
in the High Court even to call your brother a worthless 
fool.^ To break down a man's sense of his own worth 
murders his power of aspiration. It chokes the god in him 
just as surely as faith in his higher possibilities awakens 
the soul in a lost man to a new birth. The conservation of 
life demands the emancipation of the soul. 

* Matt. V. 21-22. j 



CHAPTER III 

THE SOCIALIZING OF PROPERTY 

In the preceding chapter we have called for compensa- 
tion in case of disablement or death through industrial 
accident or occupational disease, for pensions in old age, 
and for the care of working women during the period of 
maternity. But where is the money to come from for all 
these new expenditures ? Will not taxes become excessive 
and discourage thrift? Manifestly we cannot increase 
the public expenditures without increasing the pubhc 
income. Our American communities are all poor, all in 
debt, and many are perpetually near the debt hmit. They 
usually have plenty of wealthy people among their citizens, 
but as communities they have often been threadbare, out 
at the elbows, and apparently mthout soap to clean up. 
There is plenty of property, but it is not available for social 
purposes. If we want to conserve hfe, we shall have to 
resociaHze property. 

What do we mean by sociaKzing property ? If a farmer 
who has a spring on his land near the road should set up 
a trough on the road and allow the pubhc the use of the 
water, he would sociahze the spring and be a pubhc bene- 
factor. If a man closed up a vacant lot and refused the 
boys permission to play ball on it, he would desociahze it. 
If a Scotch laird forced crofters from the land and converted 
it into a game preserve, he would desociahze it. When the 
London County Council opened the many small parks to 
the pubhc, to which hitherto only a few adjoining property 
owners had had access, it sociaHzed their use. When the 

419 



420 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

robber barons along the Rhine levied tribute on the mer- 
chants teaming along the road, they partly desocialized 
the great trade route of the river valley. When the 
burghers of the commercial towns bought them off for 
a lump sum, they partly resocialized the pubHc highway, 
and when they finally rased the barons' castles as nests of 
social vermin, they socialized the road more fully. When 
the Interstate Commerce Commission in 191 2 compelled 
the Express Companies to improve their antiquated serv- 
ice and to lower their extortionate charges, it partly social- 
ized a great branch of transportation, and when Congress 
at last established the parcels post, it socialized the same 
branch more fully. 

By ^^socializing property" we mean, then, that it is made 
to serve the pubhc good, either by the service its uses render 
to the public welfare, or by the income it brings to the 
public treasury. In point of fact, however, no important 
form of property can be entirely withdrawn from public 
service ; human life is too social in its nature to allow it. 
If a rich man builds a ten-foot wall around his estate and 
admits nobody, the birds will still nest and sing there to 
the poorest passer-by, and his trees will produce oxygen 
that is wafted to the slum. Socializing property will mean, 
therefore, that instead of serving the welfare of a small 
group directly, and the public welfare only indirectly, it will 
be made more directly available for the service of all. 

The socializing of property at times becomes of life and 
death importance to society when the slow accumulation 
of great social changes has turned old rights into present 
wrongs. That is the present situation in our country. 
When our great territory was being settled men took pos- 
session of the land, hunted and fished, cut down the forest, 
and encroached on no right of society in doing so. In 
fact, they were effectively socializing the land by using 
it as their private property. If they were enterprising 



THE SOCIALIZING OF PROPERTY 42 1 

enough to use water power for a dam and mill also, or opened 
a mine, they were serving the common good. But as the 
country fills up and its resources are needed for the use of 
thousands, the old rights change. Cutting or burning the 
forest becomes a menace to far-off farming tracts which are 
deprived of their rainfall and to cities in the valleys which 
are threatened by flood. Defiling the watershed from 
which cities draw their water may become more deadly 
than murder. The modern wholesale methods of utiKzing 
the natural resources make inroads on the common wealth 
of the nation of a wholly different character from formerly. 
Fishing with a rod or hand-net is one thing ; scooping the 
whitefish out of the great lakes by steam power is a very 
different thing. No one feared the settler with his axe; 
a lumber company slashing square miles of timber and 
replanting none may be a public menace. 

Thus the mere expansion of society has caused a shifting 
of right and wrong in all property questions. Our moral 
and legal theories about the rights of the individual in 
using the resources of nature and in operating his tools to 
get wealth, are based on the assumption of a sparse popula- 
tion and of simple methods of production which we have 
largely outgrown. What was once legitimate and useful is 
now becoming a dangerous encroachment on the rights of 
society. Property rights will have to be resociahzed to 
bring them into accordance with our actual moral relations. 
If all memory of past property rights were miraculously 
blotted from our minds overnight, no sane man would 
think of allotting property as it is now allotted. All 
would reahze that the great necessities of society, our 
coal and iron mines, our forests, our watersheds and harbor 
fronts must be owned by society and operated for the 
common good. But the plain path of justice and good 
sense is blocked by the property rights brought down from 
a different past. We can blame no one for holding and 



422 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

defending what he has bought or inherited. But what is 
society to do? The same question confronted the world 
when it was emerging from the feudal into the industrial 
age at the end of the eighteenth century. The rising busi- 
ness class found the world divided up between the Church, 
the feudal nobles, and the city guilds. It cleared the deck 
to suit its needs by abrogating old property rights whole- 
sale. Whenever it suited its needs. Capitalism has been the 
great expropriator par excellence. May it not be done by 
as it did, for it rode into power roughshod, reckless of the 
suffering it inflicted. 

One universal problem of civilization is how to resocialize 
the land on which our cities stand. Public health and 
public wealth alike demand its social ownership. The 
time was when the land on which lower New York now 
stands was worth a trifle. If it had then been acquired by 
the community and leased to the citizens at moderate 
rentals, increasing as the value of the land increased, New 
York would always have had ample funds for all public 
needs without raising a dollar of taxes, and it would be 
incomparably the richest and most sumptuous city in the 
world. All the graft inevitably fastening on such wealth 
could not, in the nature of things, have made away with 
quite so much public property as the private appropriation 
of the unearned increment has actually sequestered. That 
the city lands would have been built up under a system of 
leaseholds is proved by the fact that the lands of the Astors, 
the Goelets, the Rhinelanders, and of Snug Harbor are 
well built up. If the land could be Astorized, why could 
it not have been socialized ? England has been owned by 
a few people ; the people had to pay the State taxes and 
the landlords rent ; yet the English nation has grown rich. 
Would it not have grown richer if the nation had owned the 
land, and the people had paid their rent to the State and 
no taxes to anybody ? 



THE SOCIALIZING OF PROPERTY 423 

The question is how to socialize the land now that the 
enormous social values are in private hands, and to wrong 
nobody in the doing of it. There would be no wrong if 
the community decided by law to take any unearned in- 
crease of value accruing after a given date; that would 
leave all past values intact for the present owners. There 
would be a minimum of suffering if the taxation of land 
values were gradually increased through a term of ten or 
twenty years until it came near absorbing the whole annual 
rental value. If buildings were simultaneously relieved 
of taxation, the earnings of private thrift would ^o into 
private hands, and the results of social growth would go 
to society. The man that can get no wisdom from the 
Singletaxers has padlocked his intellect. 

The Single Tax would leave the title to the land with the 
present owners and merely socialize the unearned rental 
values. But it would be highly desirable for every com- 
munity to own outright far more land than our communi- 
ties now own, as a basis for a larger and finer community 
life, for more spacious public buildings, and for the housing 
of the poorer classes. Some English cities have bought 
up their slum districts, torn down the old tenements, and 
laid out new and splendid streets, at great profit to the 
public treasury and great detriment to the death rate. 
When New York laid out Central Park, it seemed Hke 
riotous finance, but the park has long ago paid for itself 
by the increase of taxable values around it. When city 
planning is going on, why should not the cities themselves 
get the increased values they create by buying land affected 
and leasing it under restrictions as to architectural excel- 
lence? German cities buy large suburban tracts, lay 
them out in lots of assorted sizes, fence them, and rent them 
out as gardens to people who enjoy spending their evenings 
and Sundays in open-air life, raising flowers and vegetables. 
As the city grows, the entire tract is laid out for building 



424 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

lots in accordance with plans made long ahead. In several 
countries taxpayers are allowed to fix their own assessments, 
but the community has the right to buy the property at 
the figure they name. There is material for a delicious 
comedy in the agonies of a clever taxpayer who tries to 
beat the devil around the stump under these conditions. 

The time is coming now when large capital will invest 
in agricultural lands. Would it be for the public good for 
a corporation to own a half or a quarter of a State and 
control the tenant farmers on it? All history answers 
that any approximation to such a condition would be a 
peril. If so, this is the time to make it impossible. New 
Zealand levies a progressive tax on large holdings. Our 
States and the federal government should keep all the land 
they still have and henceforth lease it instead of selling. 
And if the conditions of any land grants have not been 
fulfilled, they should be revoked. The Conservation Move- 
ment has come too late for the good of our nation, but we 
still have a remnant of our heritage to hold for our children. 

Mines, oil wells, and natural gas wells are specialized 
forms of land, of the highest importance to an industrialized 
nation. While mines were small and operated competi- 
tively, private ownership was the best way to socialize their 
products. Now that mines are great social undertakings, 
and their products are sold at monopoly prices, has private 
ownership any basis in reason or ethics? The idea that 
there can be any absolute ownership in a mine, as in a coat, 
is preposterous. Did the Almighty stock the rocks of 
Pennsylvania with anthracite for the benefit of a few thou- 
sand stockholders, or did he provide for the use of a great 
nation ? God made the coal ; the mining companies made 
the holes in the coal ; they have a right to what they made. 
Mining rights are essentially like franchises ; the obligation 
to render public service is an expressed or implied condition 
of the grant and the sole moral basis of it. If a corporation 



THE SOCIALIZING OF PROPERTY 425 

/ uses the gift of the people to charge the same people ex- 
tortionate prices for the necessaries of life, the action is 
morally base and forfeits most of the claim to consideration 
that property owners otherwise have. 

Water power, too, a joint product of the sun and the 
strata of the rocks, is a social possession and should never be 
alienated outright by the. community. The laws govern- 
ing riparian rights need overhauling.^ The absurd legal 
assumption that the beds of rivers, and even lakes, is owned 
by the abutting property owners, was imported from Eng- 
land, a land of tiny rivers and huge landlords with law- 
making powers. My city of Rochester is cut in two by 
the Genesee, a river of dangerous floods, with three great 
falls and a deep gorge within the city Kmits. The city 
bears the expense of costly bridges and KabiHty for damages 
by flood, but it gets no compensating income from the 
river. The water rights were aHenated long ago, and are 
now mostly held by a single corporation. Even under pri- 
vate ownership the river has helped to make Rochester. 
If all its possibilities were sociahzed, the city would become 
splendid. 

The problem of sociaKzing property becomes most acute 
wherever private ownership has established a virtual 
monopoly and charges monopoly prices. In that case pri- 
vate ownership has become positively imsocial. ^^The 
very purpose of monopoly is to secure unearned income,'' ^ 
and how can such a purpose be either social or moral ? The 

• problem with which our nation is now wrestling is how to 
resocialize monopohstic corporations that refuse to bow 

1 The Hon. Geo. P. Decker of Rochester, N.Y., who had to give special 
attention to the matter as counsel for the State of New York, has discussed 
"Riparian Right and Power Conservation in New York" in a valuable 
pamphlet, 191 2. 

2 Professor R. T. Ely, ''Sociahsm and Social Reform," p. 272. His whole 
treatment of the socialization of monopolies, pp. 253-300, is very sane and 
thorough. 



426 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

their mighty necks under the yoke of public service. We 
are proceeding at present under the assumption that gov- 
ernment inspection and control, pubHcity and the pressure 
of public opinion, can socialize them. But can it ? Is not 
the form of their organization too exclusive, and the purpose 
of their profit-making too unsocial, ever to make them more 
than forced servants of the common good ? 

Private property is an indispensable basis of civilization 
and morahty. The per capita amount of it ought not to 
lessen ; it ought to increase. But for the present the great 
ethical need is to reemphasize and reclaim social property 
rights which are forgotten or denied. Society has rights 
even in the most purely private property. Neither religion, 
nor ethics, nor law recognize such a thing as an absolute 
private property right. Religion teaches that all property 
is a trust and the owner but a steward. Ethics makes the 
moral title to property depend on the service the owner 
renders by means of it. The law can dispossess me under 
the right of eminent domain if the community needs my 
property. In war the State can commandeer anything I 
have, even my body. Private property is historically an 
offshoot of communal property and exists by concession and 
sufferance. The whole institution of private property 
exists because it is for the public good that it shall exist. 
If in any particular it becomes dangerous to the public wel- 
fare, it must cease. Solus reipuhliccB summa lex, ReK- 
gious teaching can do much to make the partnership of the 
community in private property a conscious force in pubKc 
thought. The doctrine of stewardship must be backed by 
knowledge of law and history, and become more than an 
amiable generaHty. 

The right of a man to his home, his clothing, and any 
simple savings of his labor is not practically questioned by 
anybody. The social use of that can easily be controlled 
by law. It is different with great fortunes. Even if their 



THE SOCIALIZING OF PROPERTY 427 

accumulation is just, their perpetuation is dangerous. The 
community may allow the man who has collected a great 
fortune its undisturbed possession during his Hfetime, but 
the moral claim to it weakens when he tries to govern it by 
his will after he is dead and gone. The right to make a will 
and to have the community enforce it is historically a recent 
right, and all governments Hmit it. A man cannot do what 
he will with his own ; in America he cannot completely dis- 
inherit his wife, and in Germany his child. The law rec- 
ognizes the right of the State to take a share, and a large 
share, of an estate at death. A progressive inheritance tax 
is one of the most approved ways of resociaUzing large 
fortunes, and it should be applied far more thoroughly than 
hitherto, not only to add to the pubHc income, but to pro- 
tect the social order. 

Every successful effort to better the pay in depressed 
industries, to shorten the hours, to increase the comforts and 
safety of the workers, to provide for them in case of dis- 
ablement, and to put a larger proportion of the profits of 
business at the service of the working class is a partial 
socialization of business. The social dividend, which arises 
through the cooperation of all social factors in production, 
is to-day appropriated by Umited private groups, and divided 
among them according to their abihty to seize it. The 
people have lost control of it. How far society will go in 
coming days in resuming control, no one can now foretell. 
But it is plain that it must get a far different grip on the 
social property and social rights involved in so-called pri- 
vate business. A private business that employs thousands 
of people, uses the natural resources of the nation, enjoys 
exemptions and privileges at law, and is essential to the 
welfare of great communities is not a private business. It 
is pubHc, and the sooner we abandon the fiction that it 
is private, the better for our good sense. 

Finally I want to mention, what logically ought to go first, 



428 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

— the socialization of public money. Taxes are a beneficent 
social institution; they buy more for us than any other 
money we spend. But they have been put to very unsocial 
uses. Conquerors and despots have taxed nations, not in 
order to have funds for public improvements, but to carry 
off the swag and consume it in riotous living, which they 
called regal magnificence. We still have duodecimo king- 
lets, who use some of our taxes for giving themselves or their 
courtiers easy jobs or junketing trips. They desocialize 
the public income. The best way to put a stop to them is 
to socialize the machinery of government still further by 
direct nominations, direct legislation, and the recall. 

The method of collecting taxes has also been made to 
accomplish side purposes profitable to private interests. 
Rome used to farm out the taxes of provinces as we farm out 
street railway franchises^ and the Roman business men who 
bought the right to collect the taxes used them to collect a 
great deal more for themselves besides. These were the 
^^ publicans" whose underlings appear in the New Testa- 
ment as persons so detested that it took the religious insight 
of Jesus to discover any good in them. We have similarly 
tried to make our system for collecting taxes on imports 
serve the additional purpose of exempting our business men 
from the stress of foreign competition, in the hope that they 
would, of their own free will, socialize the benefits of their 
^^protection" for their workingmen and the public. We are 
not at present enthusiastic about the results of our gener- 
osity, and find it urgently necessary to resocialize our revenue 
system. The surest way to make our taxation serve public 
uses only is to collect direct taxes only. Indirect taxes are 
supposed to be easy to collect because the people do not 
feel them. In other words, they are a device to hoodwink 
the people. They are, in fact, an invention of unsocial 
governments, of an age when Government and the People 
were not identical, but hostile interests. Indirect taxes 



THE SOCIALIZING OF PROPERTY 429 

are a cover for all kinds of deceptions, and in the end the 
most costly of all taxes. 

The resocializing of property is an essential part of the 
christianizing of the social order. If we can give back to 
the community which creates them the unearned ingredients 
in rent and profit, we shall make commerce and industry 
honest, and at the same time increase the public wealth 
available for the protection of Ufe, for the education of the 
young, and for the enrichment of culture and civilization. 
If we can resocialize the public property which is now in 
private possession, we shall democratize industry, secure far 
greater attention to the problems of public welfare, and win 
more genuine respect for what is truly private property. 

The problem is how to accomplish these very righteous 
ends without inflicting too much incidental suffering. Some 
suffering there is bound to be. It is humanly impossible to 
straighten a crippled Hmb without pain. We shall have to 
set over against the possible cost of suffering inflicted by a 
Christian reorganization of property the far greater suffering 
that is now inflicted every day and hour by the continuance 
of ancient wrongs, and the still vaster suffering that will 
grow out of our sins if we fail now to right them. For "^ the 
wages of sin is death,'' and humanity is so closely bound 
together that the innocent must weep and die for the sins 
the dead have done. In his second inaugural Abraham 
Lincoln said : — 

"Fondly do we hope, devoutly do we pray, that this mighty 
scourge of war may pass away. Yet if it is God's will that it 
continue until the wealth piled by bondsmen by two hundred 
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every 
drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another 
drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, 
so it must still be said, that ^the judgments of the Lord are 
true and righteous altogether.'" 



CHAPTER IV 

COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 

An increase in socialized property and an increase in 
public functions go hand in hand. They are obverse sides 
of the same thing. Every function of the community is 
based on public property. 

For generations we have been taught to regard every in- 
crease of public property and public functions with a sort 
of instinctive dread. The doctrine that the best State 
governs least has been drilled into us as civic orthodoxy. 
In fact, it is a dangerous heresy. 

As in most heresies, there is a modicum of truth in it. 
As long as the State was run for the benefit of a class of 
aristocratic idlers, who regarded the wealth of the industri- 
ous classes chiefly as an object of extortionate taxation and 
interference, the people might well pray for an indolent 
government that would let them alone. A bad man is most 
amiable when he is asleep. On the other hand, the more 
democracy makes the State and the People to be identical 
in extent and interest, the less reason is there to fear state 
activity. Under true democracy state action comes to 
mean action of the People for their own common good, and 
why should we fear that ? 

As the State becomes democratic, the old situation is 
reversed. The people now desire an extension of state 
functions and the aristocratic class fear it. They do not 
want the community to interfere with the profits of child 
labor and adulteration. They do not want public owner- 
ship to cut under the unearned income of their monopolies. 

430 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 43 1 

They want to be let alone. Let Government swing the 
policeman's club to protect Business, and let Business do 
the rest. 

Against the doctrine that the best State governs least, I 
set the assertion that the finest public life will exist in a 
community which has learned to combine its citizens in the 
largest number of cooperative functions for the common good. 

We often wonder why, with such vigorous moral feeling, 
we have so Httle pubhc spirit. How can we have it ? Would 
we breed a strong family spirit if we had no family furniture 
except a garbage barrel and confined the parents to the 
function of spanking the children when they were naughty ? 
PubHc spirit grows up around pubhc property. Go over 
the Hst of your city property, and you will find that the 
classes of property there enumerated, the schools, parks, 
playgrounds, markets, baths, libraries, and hospitals, are 
the feeders of the public spirit in your community. What 
difference would it have made to the resonance of pubHc 
spirit in Boston, for instance, if Boston Common had been 
sold a century ago and built up with private business blocks ? 
PubHc spirit grows by common action. Some people feel 
that war is actually desirable as a kind of regeneration of 
patriotism. The reason is that war is a tremendous common 
action that generates collective consciousness. It is not the 
kilHng, but the soHdarity that has thrown a halo of glory 
even about the brutahty of war. Those cities which have 
made most progress in recent years in expanding their 
communal activities and in reasserting the rights of the 
people over their pubKc service corporations have shown an 
increase in public spirit and civic mind that has braced all 
other cities. The long lethargy of China has largely been 
due to the fact that outside of the powerful bonds of the 
family and clan, there has been no public activity, no com- 
munal property, and consequently no social mind.^ 

1 Professor E. A. Ross, "The Changing Chinese." 



432 . CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

The whole capitaHstic business world by its instinctive 
predisposition is in a silent league against public ownership. 
A corporation president who comes out for an extension of 
public functions is quoted with wonder as a sort of freak of 
openmindedness. All academic poUtical economy used to 
preach the doctrine of laissez faire. The press, too, obeys 
the influences of wealth that conttol it. A bureau organized 
for that purpose has long supplied it with tainted news 
crying down public ownership. 

But in spite of these persuasive influences the whole 
civilized world is calmly gravitating toward ever greater 
community functions. The social achievements created 
by civiHzation before the present age of inventions have all 
been taken out of private hands. Toll roads and toll 
bridges owned by individuals or corporations are becoming 
extinct. In a list of municipal property I failed to find any 
mention of the streets at all; they are so much public 
property that we hardly know it. The organization for 
fighting fire used to be run by corporations for profits ; the 
excited owner enjoyed ^^ freedom of contract" to make 
terms with them while his house was burning down. Courts 
and prisons used to be owned and operated by the feudal 
nobles as valuable adjuncts to their methods of getting 
money. War used to be the private privilege of gentlemen ; 
the two buttons on the back of our frock coats still remind 
us of the sword belt our fathers wore. The schools have 
been socialized almost completely. Would any one care to 
revert from these community functions ? 

The new outfit of civilization created since the invention 
of steam and electric machinery will have to go the same 
way. Most communities have developed some economic 
functions, and after the first difficulties have been overcome, 
there is never any desire to go back to private ownership. 
Our postal service certainly has some moss-grown spots, 
but a referendum to hand it over to the express companies 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 433 

would probably not get a record majority. Some cities 
could be persuaded to get along without their traction com- 
panies ; none wants to get rid of the municipal water sys- 
tem. Public ownership of gas and railways seems to us 
next door to socialism and heathenism. In England, where 
some cities have long enjoyed municipal gas for fifty or 
sixty cents, and in Germany, where state railways are a 
source of common comfort and profit, they think these 
things are just common sense. Every community wants at 
least those pubHc functions which it now has, and usually 
more. Every pubHc ofi&cer who takes his duties seriously 
and enthusiastically wants to increase pubHc functions 
and property at some point. Every reformer is charged 
with sociaHsm, because no constructive reform is possible 
without taking a leaf from the book of socialism. The 
tendency toward community action at present is like a 
ratchet wheel ; it moves only one way. This sort of his- 
torical verdict outweighs all academic theories and all re- 
ports of investigating commissions. Back of the present 
demand for home rule for cities, commission government, 
the referendum and recall, is the desire for more public 
ownership. We have not dared to expand the activities of 
our cities because our poHtics were dishonest. Therefore we 
are getting a firmer grip on the men who are to manage our 
public property in the future so that they will find honesty 
the best policy. 

When Capitalism was superseding the antiquated handi- 
craft system at the end of the eighteenth century, it de- 
veloped the doctrine of laissezfaire. Its attractive element 
was that it stood for the free and natural play of economic 
forces, while state activity stood for artificial interference. 
To-day Capitalism is becoming antiquated, and if economic 
forces were allowed free play, they would run swiftly toward 
community ownership in some large sections of economic 
activity. Laissez faire to-day means public ownership. 

2F 



434 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

But economic forces are not allowed free play ; the Interests 
block the way ; they are now the power of artificial inter- 
ference. One postmaster-general after the other has ad- 
vocated government ownership of the telegraph system. 
Ours is the only great nation that has left the telegraph in 
private hands, and for years we have had the worst service 
in the world. But the Western Union has barricaded the 
path of common sense. Our post office has cheapened its 
letter rates again and again; its parcel rates it could not 
cheapen because the express companies stood in the way. 
The banks long blocked the postal savings bank experiment 
which had proved its usefulness in other countries. When 
public sentiment forced it through, the banking influence 
turned the new postal savings banks into feeders and col- 
lecting agencies of the banks. They can receive only 
small amounts, can offer only 2 per cent interest, and must 
redeposit 95 per cent of their deposits in the private banks 
at 2 1 per cent, leaving the more profitable end of the deal 
to the banks. Philadelphia years ago had a fair municipal 
gas system. But private interests held up appropriations 
for improvements until it ran down and was sold back to 
them. The socialists at Milwaukee have had similar 
experience of active interference with community activity. 
Every community may well say to the Interests now, 
'^ Laissez faire, laissez alter! Let us alone. Let things 
follow their natural course." 

As an illustration of a judicious form of cooperative 
action on a large scale I should like to refer to the Public 
Trustee Act which went into effect in England in 1908. 
Some of us know to our cost that the duties of an executor or 
trustee of an estate are troublesome and arduous. Private 
persons rarely have the necessary information ; they may 
die ; they may prove dishonest. This Act created a Public 
Trustee ^^who will never die, never leave the country, and 
never become incapacitated, and whose responsibility is 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 435 

guaranteed by the Consolidated Funds of the United King- 
dom." The Act was opposed, of course; it was predicted 
that the work would be expensive, tangled in red tape, done 
without consideration of human interests, and there would 
be little call for it. Instead of that the business increased 
swiftly ; the staff by 191 2 had grown to 208 persons, housed 
in 53 rooms ; 2993 cases had been accepted, administering 
property worth $120,000,000 ; 2200 intending testators had 
applied for the services of the Public Trustee and the total 
value of business negotiated had mounted to $340,000,000. 
The Trustee may decline to accept a case, but not because 
the property involved is small; the purpose is that the 
specialized skill and experience of the office shall be at the 
command of the common man and woman. A trust 
company has the experience, but it exists to make a profit 
for its stockholders even when it is investing funds; the 
Public Trustee, if he is honest at all, has no such dual 
allegiance. There is no profit to be earned for any one. 
The fees are simply to cover the expenses of the staff and 
office and insure the public funds against Joss. They were 
fixed as low as any in the world, yet a sHght surplus has 
been earned. There was certainly danger that an imper- 
sonal pubhc office could not develop the necessary human 
interest to receive the most intimate secrets of people and 
to care for orphans and queer old ladies, but under the 
leadership of Mr. Charles J. Stewart the staff has appar- 
ently entered with genuine pubhc spirit into its varied obh- 
gations, even providing Christmas and wedding presents.^ 
The natural monopohes, — railways, surface Hues, ele- 
vated roads, subways, water ways, telegraph and telephone 
systems, gas and electric fight and power systems, — these 
are the irreducible minimum which must come under public 
ownership. They are all monopohes in their very nature. 
Competition in their case is economic nonsense. But if 

1 For information address "The Public Trustee, London, England." 



436 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

we must have monopoly, then a monopoly over which the 
people have clear jurisdiction and which will turn its monop- 
oly income into the public treasury, is by far the best 
kind of monopoly. Any loss through graft tapping the 
public income will never be as great as the loss of the entire 
profit through private ownership ; any undue influence of 
the public employees will never be as corrupting as the in- 
fluence of the public service corporations has been in every 
city and State of our Union. Professor Franklin H. Gid- 
dings, one of the most eminent economists of our country, 
says: '^If I may venture an opinion as to the most impor- 
tant question in political economy before the American 
people, it is this : Shall the chief and controlling means of 
production in the United States, including mineral and 
forest resources, water power sites, railroads and means of 
communication, patent rights, and the enormous funds of 
loanable capital be owned by a billionaire Four Hundred, 
who, in virtue of such ownership, will be able for all practical 
purposes to own a hundred or more millions of us ordinary 
human beings ; or shall we ordinary human beings, in our 
' collective capacity, own the means of production ourselves 
and proceed to work out the reality of a democratic repub- 
Hc ? " 

The natural monopolies must become public property not 
only for the sake of efficient and coherent management, 
but for the sake of civic morality and public spirit. The 
corporations managing them for us have been the most 
unsocial influence in our public life, and even if they man- 
aged their business well, we cannot, in the interest of the 
higher community life, afford them any longer. When we 
have left them uncontrolled, they have devoured us. When 
we have tried to control them, they have escaped control 
by corrupting our legislatures, our executive officers, and 
our judges. Able men who might have been powerful serv- 
ants of the common good have been hired by the great 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 437 

salaries and fees drawn from unearned monopoly profit, 
and have used their wits to circumvent the agents of the 
people. The points where the corporations have touched 
politics have been the points of decay. They have turned 
in the large campaign contributions that have invited to 
corrupt practices. The financial sinews with which the 
party boss has done his work on us have come from their 
need of franchise extensions and public favors. The whole 
class of investors, the most influential class in our cities, 
has, through the pubKc service corporations, been made a 
party at interest in opposing many measures of public 
utility. The treatment of the pubhc by these monopoKes 
has been so surly and oppressive that when the people did 
get a powerful champion to protect them, as in the case of 
the Public Service Commission in New York, it was felt 
to be an immense rehef from tyranny. They fill the calen- 
dars of our courts with the most intricate and tedious cases, 
and the whole procedure of our courts would be relieved if 
these monopoHes were public property. They exist to 
make money, and are not even efficient at that. Before 
the railways were compelled to submit to government 
regulation, an eminent authority said: "Management of 
the public finances so corrupt as that which has character- 
ized the private railways of the United States would have 
produced a revolution long ago.'' ^ Many a time when their 
nerves were shattered by financial debauches, the govern- 
ment appointed a receiver, and this public ofl&cer had to 
nurse them back to health. 

We fritter away precious time by dallying at the half- 
way house of mere public supervision and control. The 
outside interference of government officers will prove in- 
efficient, meddlesome, and irritating. We must come to 
public ownership some time, and any one whose thinking 
parts are in order ought to see it by this time. When an 

1 R. T. Ely, "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 270. 



438 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

industry arrives at the stage where prices are uniform and 
fixed, where genuine competition has ceased, and where the 
size of net income indicates unearned profits, the clock 
has struck. Henceforth it should be only a question of 
ways and means. Not that we should plunge into public 
ownership at any cost. We have long been too slow; we 
may become too swift and repent at leisure when we find 
a great bonded debt saddled on a municipal industry 
against which the best management can make no head- 
way for a generation. The people are always infinitely 
more fair and generous to the corporations than the cor- 
porations are to the people, but there is no ethical obliga- 
tion on us to buy them out at their own inflated capital- 
ization. Why should we buy back at a fancy price the 
very franchise we have given as a gift or for a song, and 
which they may have corrupted our government to obtain ? 
Let us first have enforced publicity about their actual 
conditions and methods, and adequate taxation of their 
landed wealth, their franchises, and their mineral holdings. 
After that, their capitalization will be nearer the truth. 
Why should we pay for a lie ? 

Success in public management is nothing automatic. 
Our communities will have to work out success by expe- 
rience, and at present our nation is more backward in that 
important form of social knowledge than others. Some 
cities and States may find their public service unenter- 
prising and inefficient. But has corporation service never 
been so ? The question is in which case the public has the 
prompter and more effective remedy. In his admirable 
arguments against socialism Professor Ely lays stress on 
the danger of ^^a concentration of public dissatisfaction.'' ^ 
He concedes that the service is far better under public 
ownership, but the people grow impatient over every slight 
deHnquency in the public service, whereas they submit to 

1 pp. 199-204. 



COMMUNITY LITE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 439 

the miseries of corporation service with the patience of 
helplessness, and an accumulation of such dissatisfaction 
might overthrow a socialist government. Let us agree to 
that possibility; but which kind of service meanwhile is 
more likely to be kept in a condition of efficiency ? Where 
public ownership has long been in practice, as in the Aus- 
tralian commonwealths, it has proved very enterprising. 
It constantly invites to larger service. The rural delivery 
service has tugged at the leash and demanded the parcels 
post. Where trolleys and railways are owned by the public, 
they can carry the people to homes in the suburbs by giving 
free transportation to school children and cheap trans- 
portation to the working people at the hours when they 
travel. City planning is almost impossible without ex- 
tensive public ownership. A monopoly has no incentive 
to extend its service when the point of maximum profit is 
reached. It has to be pried loose to make it go farther. 

The problem of creating a body of wilHng and hard-work- 
ing employees for an expanding network of community 
service is a real problem, but a splendid and hopeful one. 
Our civil service was poor in the past because it was outside 
of the spirit of democracy. The spoils system which con- 
trolled it was essentially a recrudescence of feudal despot- 
ism. Your party boss was a miniature imitation of a feudal 
king, distributing office and largess to his courtiers, demand- 
ing the same unthinking loyalty, and viewing the public 
as an unusually large oyster. These kinglets are to-day 
fighting the invasion of the new democratic measures with 
the same moral indignation and immoral craft with which 
the European dynasties fought the inroads of democracy 
when it first began, and for the same reason. If direct 
nominations, home rule for cities, uniform accounting, com- 
mission government, direct legislation, and the recall succeed 
in really democratizing our political business, we shall soon 
see the rise of a new type of public officers who will be leaders 



440 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of the coming social order. There are plenty of forerunners 
of that type now at work. These men will then have to 
put their own spirit into their subordinates and that re- 
quires high talents for education and organization. Indeed, 
the efficient management of the public service will call out 
human qualities of a higher order than capitalistic business. 
They will find themselves compelled to summon the public 
spirit to their aid at every turn, and to intensify and edu- 
cate it, while the managers of corporations are quite willing 
to let the public spirit drowse on with the sleeping dogs 
whom none cares to stir. 

We have dwelt so long on the socializing of the great 
public utilities because these are the backbone of com- 
munity life, and all higher efforts are hampered as long as 
these are run for profit only. But the enrichment of com- 
munity life is needed in other directions and can be begun 
on a smaller scale. 

Our American life as a whole is in great need of whole- 
some social pleasures. Pleasure resorts run for profit are 
always edging along toward the forbidden. Men spend 
most freely when under liquor or sex excitement; there- 
fore the pleasure resorts supply them with both. Where 
profit is eliminated, the quieter and higher pleasures get 
their chance. The institutions of pleasure maintained by 
the people for their own use, such as parks, playgrounds, 
museums, libraries, concerts, theaters, dance halls, are 
always cleaner than the corresponding ventures of Capital- 
ism, provided some rational supervision is maintained. I 
spent an evening in a small Missouri town, waiting for a 
train. The streets were in possession of an amusement 
company and lined with tents and booths. The company 
evidently tried not to offend the public sense of decency 
and to supply a ^' moral show." The saloons were doing a 
rushing business, but the crowds flowing along the side- 
walks were composed of clean American farmers with their 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 441 

wives and children or their sweethearts, trying to have a 
good time with the facihties offered. But those faciHties 
were so meager and so monotonous ! You could pay a 
nickel for pop corn and soft drinks ; or pay a quarter to see 
the clowns and the girls in brilliant tights perform in a vari- 
ety show ; or pay a quarter to throw balls, or toss rings, or 
shoot a rifle to win a prize. That was all ; pay, pay, pay, 
and nothing but a gambling thrill or satisfied curiosity to 
show for it. This is what Capitalism can do for our people 
in catering to their desire for recreation. Can the people 
do no better for themselves? 

Under competent leadership almost any neighborhood 
can organize a real festival with home talent, and develop 
a knack and a reputation along special lines. Such a festi- 
val may become a great moral asset of the community. 
A certain suburban ward some years ago had a simple 
Fourth of July celebration with a procession, a speech and 
song, races for the children, and fireworks from a hill- 
top. In the course of a few years it had become a feature 
of the day for the whole city and was imitated by other 
wards. The City Club of Rochester gives an annual ban- 
quet to the citizens naturalized during the year. Why 
should not these citizens, together with the young men and 
women who have attained their majority during the year, 
march in procession to the town hall and take a pledge of 
allegiance to the common good, like the young Athenians ? 
The fine sports of swimming, boating, skating, kiteflying, 
and choral dancing get a still keener tang of pleasure and 
interest when they are made social by games and compe- 
titions, and become the center of attraction at a public 
festival. Such civic undertakings are a wholesome outlet 
for vital energies that easily turn to vice ; they educate to 
chastity and beauty ; and they breed pubHc spirit. 

The time will come when every village and every city 
ward will have a noble social center, a building that will 



442 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

offer space for great meetings and little meetings, for the 
sparkling play of children and the electric play of young 
people, a gymnastic arena and a swimming pool, and when 
the so-called pleasures of the saloon and sex hell will be 
relegated to the place from which they ascended. Mean- 
while the awakening community spirit of our nation is 
looking around and taking stock of its possessions, and it 
finds — the schoolhouse and the Church. For generations 
the churches and the homes have been the only resorts for 
untainted social recreation in countless communities, and 
it is simply a question of social intelligence for those in 
control of church buildings to make them once more the 
centers of a wider community life. The appropriation of 
the schoolhouse for more varied purposes is a master stroke 
of the new democracy. The social center idea is opposed 
by amusement caterers, who want people to come to them 
and spend money ; by the old-line politicians, who shiver 
when the people begin to think for themselves on political 
questions; and by some priests of the Roman Catholic 
Church, who set their Church above all public interests and 
hope to quarantine their people against the public school 
and the common spirit of the nation. 

Nothing is foreign to community action which concerns 
the common welfare. Our forefathers had sense enough 
to hunt and fish together when united action promised 
more food than solitary effort. We too shall have to 
develop cooperative action if we want clean and plentiful 
food and drink. We have learned to do that about our 
water supply. Our municipal reservoirs and conduits are 
simply the village pump raised to the fourth power. In- 
dividualistic pumps would kill us under city conditions. 

If our city sells us liquid water, why should it not sell 
us frozen water? Ice is a necessity under modern con- 
ditions, yet we all buy it at artificial prices. If ice is dear 
in summer, babies die. It is not appetizing to inquire 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 443 

where the ice was cut that tinkles in our glass. Most of 
the ice used in New York City is cut on the Hudson River 
after Albany, Troy, and other industrial towns have dis- 
charged their sewage into it. Our health officers protect 
the purity of our water. If the city supplied our ice, would 
we not have better assurance than at present that our frozen 
water would be clean? And would the price of ice be as 
high as now? Uncle Sam has installed ice machines in 
nearly all the great department buildings at Washington. 
When the Post-office Department first installed its own 
plant in 1909, private dealers were charging $7.65 a ton; 
the Department now calculates the cost at $2.25. 

In summer we want much ice and little coal ; in winter 
we want little ice and much coal. If our cities dealt in 
both necessities, they could balance the two. The em- 
ployees and teams that carry ice in summer could carry 
coal in winter. In regard to both staples the ordinary 
family has no guarantee that they are getting the weight 
they pay for. The retail price of coal is absolutely fixed 
by the coal trust ; the local dealers have become mere dis- 
tributing agents. What moral obligation has a community 
to leave its members at the mercy of a monopoly ? The 
whole question of coal prices would get a new ventilation if 
great cities entered the market as wholesale dealers in coal. 

Milk is the one hold on life for the little children. This 
most vulnerable part of our population, the most decent 
and respectable citizens we have, are dependent on the 
cleanliness and purity of the milk supply for their health and 
their Hfe. We know that our health officers have to keep 
up an incessant fight against dirty and tuberculous milk, 
and that their efforts are never really successful or their 
successes permanent. The milk business is too vital a 
part of human life to be left to those who have no interest 
in it except their profit. Every city should run at least a 
small dairy that would supply the nursing babies with 



444 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

clean milk. That would save many a little life dear to 
the mother that bore it, and would popularize new stand- 
ards of cleanliness. Here is a means for the enfranchised 
women to prove that they are able to teach men some new 
arts in municipal housekeeping.^ 

The trade in drugs should be taken over by the com- 
munity as part of the care of public health. That drugs 
at present are very commonly adulterated is a notorious 
fact. Adulteration is easy, for who can test their genuine- 
ness? Most drug stores show by their very appearance 
that medical science has been crowded into one corner, 
and that commercialism runs the establishment. Every 
advance in rational living and in true medical science lessens 
the amount of drugs used. The drug stores cannot live 
on their legitimate business, and are gradually forced in 
the direction of debased trade. Some become purveyors 
to all kinds of vices and have helped to fasten the various 
drug habits on our people which are secretly undermining 
the health and character of uncounted individuals. They 
are dragging the doctors down with them into commercial- 
ism. We must either standardize the drug stores or mu- 
nicipalize them. In Germany they are licensed ; their num- 
ber is limited ; and they are restricted to the compounding 
of prescriptions. This eliminates the temptation to price- 
cutting and adulteration to a large extent. But why should 
not the Board of Health, under the advice of the organized 
medical profession, supply drugs at cost ? Our cities now 
supply vaccine and antitoxin. All the real drugs needed 
by a large city could be stored and compounded in a single 
laboratory of moderate size. Then we could hope to deal 
with the drug habits. 

The community alone can save us from the scandal of 

^ Dr. G. W. Goler, the health officer of Rochester, N.Y., has done very 
successful work in this direction which has attracted attention throughout 
the country. He will doubtless be glad to furnish information. 



COMMUNITY LITE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 445 

our burial customs. All the appurtenances of death are 
sold at monopoly prices. When men and women come to 
bury their beloved dead, they are in no condition to be on 
the watch against avarice, and they have a right to the 
fraternal protection of all their fellows. Instead of that 
all the professional interests connected with burials have 
pushed one another into the custom of extortionate charges ; 
undertakers, cemetery associations, liverymen, and even 
priests stand in together. It is stated that undertakers 
charge five and even ten times as much for cofifins as they 
pay for them ; yet the casket manufacturers charge trust 
prices and are said to make enormous dividends. Family 
pride and the holiest affections are played on to draw the 
poor into tawdry display and ruinous expenses which cap 
the misfortune of the illness that preceded death and the 
destitution that may follow it. This is a case for community 
action. The community prohibits the individual from 
burying his dead privately ; then it is under obligations to 
furnish him the proper facilities for burial and to protect 
him against overcharge. Cemeteries and crematories 
should be public property; if religious or charitable or- 
ganizations desire sections of the cemetery set apart for 
their use, that ought not to be difficult. The work now per- 
formed by undertakers should either, as in most countries 
of Europe, be done by licensed associations whose price 
schedules are prescribed by the city, or, as in Switzer- 
land, be treated as a public service to be supplied to all 
citizens alike and at public cost. The Jews had hired 
mourners; Jesus turned in anger from their commercial- 
ized grief. What ought the Christian Church to do when 
it is compelled constantly to cooperate with the exploi- 
tation of the sacred grief of the poor and the paganizing of 
the solemn majesty of death ? ^ 

1 See articles by Graham Taylor in the Survey, Oct. 2, 191 1, and by 
Quincy L. Dowd, in the Independent, June 13, 191 2. 



446 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

A noble community life is a great aid to every family 
that has fine aspirations. When the community life is 
vicious, it is hard to keep the serpents out of our homes. 
The community has the power of praise and blame; our 
social appetite craves the good opinion of our fellow-men ; if 
their good opinion is obtained by folly, then for folly w^e shall 
spend our substance. Innumerable hard-working parents 
are straining to overdress their children because other 
people are overdressing theirs. Any one who has ever had 
to go to school in patched pants or a made-over dress to 
sit on the seat with the scornful, knows what children suffer, 
and most parents will give up almost anything to save their 
children from heartache. So we dress them up ; not be- 
cause their beautiful bodies need it, but because we must 
keep the pace set by others who may be just as much driven 
as we are. Why should not a community adopt a simple 
school uniform for all? Such a custom, without compul- 
sion, exists in Germany; also in some Catholic parochial 
schools. It actually improves the. looks of the children. 
If desired, each school can have some special* color device 
to distinguish its pupils and so create school spirit. Every 
mother can see how this would simplify the clothing prob- 
lems, save time and nerves, and save money. The school 
clothes, like army uniforms, would be produced in great 
quantities and ought therefore to be produced cheaply. 

The public spirit of our nation is mewing its wings like 
an eagle and trying its strength at new tasks. If we deny 
a community the right to undertake larger public functions, 
we cripple the public spirit and deny it the right to growth. 
If we forbid a community to increase its public property, 
we deny the public spirit its necessary tools and the ground 
to stand on. In the palmy days of Greece and Rome the 
rule prevailed that private life should be simple and public 
life ample and rich. The glorious remnants of the literary 
and artistic life that developed under that rule still justify 



COMMUNITY LIFE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT 447 

its wisdom. We have reversed that principle, making 
private men rich and our cities poor, private houses sump- 
tuous and our pubHc buildings mean. If the unearned rent 
of the land flowed into our pubhc treasury, and if our public 
utilities were a source of public income and a means of 
public service, private citizens might not have such fortunes 
to waste on the housing of their poor mortality, but our 
cities would rise clean, symmetrical, and splendid, planned 
by the genius and adorned by the love of their sons and 
daughters. 

"O beautiful for patriot's dream 
That sees beyond the years 
Thine alabaster cities gleam 
Undimmed by human tears. 
America ! America ! 
God shed his grace on thee, 
And crown thy good with brotherhood 
From sea to shining sea ! " ^ 

i ^ From the hymn, "O beautiful for spacious skies/^ .by Katharine Lee 

Bates, — the most beautiful patriotic hymn we have. 



CHAPTER V 

THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS 

The condition of the working class has been considered 
from various angles in the course of our argument, but this 
final summary of the practical steps that would lead to a 
Christian social order would be a maimed and futile thing 
if the rise of the industrial working class were omitted from 
it. Modern humanity can never be saved until the work- 
ing class is saved. The absolute mass and the relative 
weight of this class are steadily increasing in all nations. 
Other social classes are being ground up and their frag- 
ments increase the bulk of the industrial working class. 
How can society as a whole have peace and health if this 
great segment of society is left without property and se- 
curity, and if large parts of it are demoralized and sub- 
merged ? In fact, our whole national life lacks health and 
peace because it is constantly wrenched and shaken by the 
struggles of this class to escape economic and moral drown- 
ing. 

Moreover, the importance of this class for the moral 
future of humanity reaches far beyond its own member- 
ship. It is the most modern of all classes, the product of 
to-day, the creator of to-morrow, the banner bearer of 
destiny. Its rise to-day parallels the historic rise of the 
business class from the feudal social order. The feudal 
barons despised the merchant class. To levy tribute on 
the traders by highway robbery was considered a far more 
honorable occupation than to make or sell cloth. Yet 
the future belonged to the men of the ell and bale, and his- 

448 



THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS 449 

tory was digging the grave in which the gallant barons were 
to rest from their peculiar labors. So the working class is 
making its way through contempt and opposition, but its 
rise is the saHent fact of present history, and if the banner 
of the Kingdom of God is to enter through the gates of the 
future, it will have to be carried by the tramping hosts of 
labor. 

We have discussed the conservation of life.^ The indus- 
trial wage earners have the same right to Hfe and health 
as all others, but to them vitaHty and vigor are doubly 
essential because the working force of their body and mind 
is their whole asset and capital. If the working class is 
to rise, its physical fitness must be protected. The 
farmer can hardly escape fresh air at his work ; the factory 
and mine worker can rarely get it. Hand labor set its 
own pace and the automatic safeguards of the body pro- 
tected it against exhaustion ; in machine labor the pace is 
set for the workman by fellow-workers with muscles of 
steel that never tire. Therefore the industrial worker needs 
added protection against exhausted air and poisonous gases, 
and against a pace of work that drains and poisons the 
body with an accumulation of its own waste products.^ 
The man who works alone in his own home or shop can make 
his own conditions of labor ; the man who works in another 
man's factory can control the conditions only through joint 
action with his fellows or through community action. 
Therefore the industrial worker needs more social protec- 
tion than other classes. A maximum working day and a 
legal minimum of safety and comfort in the conditions of 
shop and mine labor are a concern of civilization and a step 
to a Christian social order. 

It would aid the rise of the working class if the sufferings 
of labor could be appreciated as vicarious sufferings, just 

1 Part VI, Chapter II, of this book. 

2 Josephine Goldmark, "Fatigue and Efficiency." 

2G 



450 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

as we appreciate the sufferings of soldiers who have bled 
for their country. Our industrial communities as yet have 
no adequate sense of their joint responsibiHty for the need- 
less accidents of industry. The Church ought to be the 
organized social conscience ; has it done its part to convict 
us of our guilt ? A medieval pope is said to have put him- 
self under church discipline because a man had starved in 
his city of Rome. Would it not be a fit function for the 
Church to summon the people once a year to an act of 
common mourning for those who died while doing the dan- 
gerous work for all, and to an act of common contrition in 
so far as their death was preventable and needless? At 
Gloucester, in Massachusetts, when the fishing fleet is home 
for the season, the town unites in a service, calling the joU 
of those who lost their Hves at sea and thereby taking on the 
common heart the grief of those who are bereaved, and 
then the children cast flowers on the outgoing tide to be 
carried out to sea where the dead are buried. Why should 
not the churches of an industrial community unite with its 
labor organizations to find a fitting religious expression for 
what we ought to feel when men die at their posts where 
they labored for all, and when strong bodies are crushed 
that might be enjoying the light of life but for our neglect ? 

Since the wage earner sells, not goods, but life, the 
community is even more concerned in the fairness of his 
bargains than in other commercial transactions. As 
weights and measures are inspected to protect buyers, and 
as railway freight rates are reviewed and fixed to protect 
shippers, so the wages paid to workers and the methods by 
which they are paid should be scrutinized by the community 
through duly authorized wage boards to protect the in- 
dividual workers against misuse of their ignorance or 
helplessness. 

The rise of the working class involves an increase in their 
share of the profits of business. Modern business is a 



THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS 45 1 

social process, and the community is a partner in every 
phase of it ; most of all where public rights and resources 
are needed to carry on the business, as in the public utilities 
and in mining. Capital should have its fair return, but 
after that is paid, the other factors of industry should get 
their share of the social dividend by increased wages and 
lower prices. Social peace and a Christian social order 
will never come without a juster distribution of the joint 
profits of industry. 

As consumers the industrial wage earners are concerned 
with all others in getting honest goods at prices that con- 
tain no monopoly charges and no unnecessary middlemen's 
profits. Their rise as a class would be greatly aided by 
cooperative organizations.^ The housing problem is pe- 
culiarly pressing for this class because they are massed in 
industrial centers. Communities that solve the problem 
of local transportation and of land taxation will thereby 
solve in large part the housing problem.^ Because work- 
ingmen live close together and under uniform conditions 
their housing invites community action on a large scale. 
Their homes are in a peculiar danger of invasion by tene- 
ment-house manufacturing, which harnesses women and 
children and the home itself to industrial production and 
uses them up to save the employer part of his expenses. 
It should be prohibited entirely. 

Nothing so holds down the rise of the working class as 
the dragging fringe of unemployed workers. Its chronic 
existence charges our whole social system with incompetence 
and anarchy. Our political parties have dodged that vital 
question, lavishing their enthusiasm on issues that seem 
paltry by the side of this. If, as is alleged, some employers 
purposely maintain a body of unemployed workmen in 
order to keep a thorn bit in the mouth of Labor, I have no 
words to characterize so inhuman a policy. The best work 

^ Part V, Chapter VII, of this book. 2 p^rt VI, Chapter II. 



452 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

on this bafHing problem has been done by the labor unions, 
and this alone would justify their existence. We need a 
connected system of employment bureaus, such as the 
longer experience of older countries has worked out. But 
it must be controlled by the class it is to serve and not by 
any interest hostile to it. 

The wage earners are now a propertyless class ; if they 
are to rise to even worth with the other social classes, they 
must have the security and moral stimulus of property 
rights. Public opinion and the law must come to recognize 
the property right of a worker in the business to which he 
contributes his energies. This right can best be recognized 
by giving him, hke the civil servants of the government, 
a claim on his job unless dismissed for cause.^ Social in- 
surance against industrial accident, occupational disease, 
and old age would act as a property right, and would save 
workingmen from dropping into the bottomless pit of pov- 
erty and from the constant fear of it. 

The rise of Labor and the spread of education are in- 
separable. All except the higher machine labor dulls the 
intellect by its monotony and demands extra educational 
stimulus to offset it. Every workingman should have 
enough technical education to understand the productive 
process of which he is part; such comprehension would 
support him in the dullness of his own labor. As industry 
becomes socialized, it can be put into cooperative relation 
to the higher schools, so that industrial and educational 
work, each fertilizing the other, can go on side by side after 
adolescence. If the problem of unemployment were solved, 
the working people would not have to be as suspicious as 
they now are of vocational schools and industrial training. 
The intellectual earnestness with which assembKes of 
workingmen handle their problems, the absence among 
them of the dilettant tone with its unreaHty, and the tire- 

1 Part V, Chapter III, of this book. 



THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS 453 

lessness with which they Usten to anything that seems 
to them to concern real Hfe impress every one who deals 
with them and guarantee their intellectual future. To feed 
their intellectual hunger is one of the simplest services 
which men and women of the professional classes can render 
them. But the eight-hour day and a workless Sunday 
would be the surest aids to their intellectual development. 

As humanity is constituted, the rise of the working class 
can be neither easy nor painless. Its desires conflict with 
the interests of the most powerful classes, and its progress 
can come only through class struggle. The Christian forces 
of society must not block that struggle, but ease and speed 
it, so that a minimum of class hatred will cloud it, and a 
maximum of class valor will be generated. For the ad- 
vancement of this class the organizations of labor are in- 
dispensable. If outsiders have been doubtful about that, 
the instinct of the working class has never wavered. Even 
if the progress of the working class were likely to be achieved 
for it by outside influences, it is not morally desirable that 
it should be. They must win their own prizes and qualify 
for them by effort. We are told that trades-unionism is an 
affair of a minority of the wage earners and not a movement 
of the whole class. Every upward movement of humanity 
is carried upward by a minority; except at the highest 
emotional moments the mass is sluggish. ^'The many are 
called, but few are the elect." The fewer they are, the more 
worthy of honor and aid. 

PubHc opinion and the law must uphold the working class 
in their demand for collective bargaining. No other form 
of bargaining puts the two parties to this contract on a level 
so that the bargain is free from coercion. In the long run 
collective bargaining will prove to the advantage of the 
capitaHst class, too. The wage contracts between capital 
and labor to-day involve issues so large that they are not 
private affairs. The community has a stake in them and 



454 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

should be represented by wage boards and boards of con- 
ciliation and arbitration to protect the public interest and 
to add the impartial fairness of outside public opinion in 
case of disputes. 

The rise of the working class in the last century would 
have been impossible without the political rights of free 
speech, free assembly, free organization, and free press. 
Every advance in genuine political democracy is a further 
gain to the working class, and unless the working class 
ultimately attains economic democracy, political democracy 
will come to be a hollow and dishonest form.^ In the future 
too the struggle of the working class will have to be fought 
out in part on the political field. The business class is now 
in control of our political machinery and is using it with 
tremendous effectiveness. The working class can secure 
equal justice only by a readjustment of political power. 
On the economic field the number of the workers is their 
weakness, for they bid against each other; at the ballot ^ 
box their number is their strength. The old parties have J 
neglected or fooled their working class constituency in ^ 
the past, and any alliance hereafter between an organized 
working-class group and the management of the old parties 
would certainly lead to scandals and betrayals. The Social- 
ist Party represents the point of view and the interests of the 
working class just as accurately as the old parties have rep- 
resented Capitalism. Even if a man dissents from the 
philosophy of Socialism and is dubious about its ultimate 
aims, he cannot help recognizing that in Europe this minor- 
ity party has done more to force the working-class prob- 
lems to the front and to secure labor measures from the 
upper classes than any other influence in politics. 

A man who has his eye on history would be rash indeed 
if he denied that the rise of the working class involved seri- 
ous risks for the rest of society. No class that pushed its 

1 Part III, Chapter V, of this book. 



THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS 455 

way up has ever held the balance of justice even ; the busi- 
ness class certainly did not; yet it would have been far 
worse for society if it had been left with the feudal aris- 
tocracy and clergy in control. If the working class secures 
the legal right to organization, employment, insurance, and 
pensions, it may create privileged groups that will keep 
others out and down in order to make these privileges worth 
more. In the village communes and in the guild system 
an aristocracy of Labor grew up that took to special priv- 
ilege just as kindly as any other form of aristocracy. We 
must trust to the modern spirit of democracy and the politi- 
cal grip of our grandchildren to deal with the centipede 
of Labor as we now have to deal with the octopus of Capi- 
tal. Our present duty seems clear, and that is all we can 
ask. If men had always waited till no possibility of evil 
had lurked in their ventures, neither the American Revolu- 
tion, nor the Protestant Reformation, nor the discovery of 
America, nor the founding of the Christian Church, nor the 
creation of Adam would ever have happened. To strike for 
what is plainly good and right, and to risk the rest, is faith. 

At any rate, the working class embodies an immense fund 
of moral energy which we need to equip the Christian social 
order. The members of good trades-unions feel that their 
influence is a great moral force. That influence is much 
more searching and forcible because exerted by their own 
fellows than if it were professionalized or exerted by a 
higher class. The support and comfort given by the 
unions to their members in time of trouble is also ethically 
higher than the charity of an upper class would be ; it is 
cooperative and thereby cleansed of degrading elements. 

The working class lays the stress on the human virtues 
differently than the middle class and the churches, and this 
makes it hard for each of the two sections to appreciate the 
qualities of the other. The churches have laid chief stress 
on the conquest of animal passions ; the working class ap- 



4S6 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

predates social solidarity above all things. The churches 
will exclude a man who drinks, and tolerate a man who over- 
reaches in trade ; the working class will tolerate a man who 
drinks, and loathe a man who takes another man's job 
away from him. Each side would be the better if it adopted 
the virtues loved by the other in addition to its own. 
The churches are tainted with the money morality of Capital- 
ism ; the trades-unions have not emerged from the barbarity 
of alcoholism. Probably no one thing would do so much to 
increase the fighting capacity of the working class and to win 
the moral confidence of that great body of virtue which is 
organized in the churches, as for the labor unions to follow 
the almost unanimous verdict of science and the call of 
their best leaders and to break with alcohoHsm. The in- 
dividual physical impairment after drink, which continues 
for several days, becomes a social peril amid machine and 
gang labor. The impairment of self-restraint and good 
judgment by even a slight dose of alcohol endangers the 
cause of labor in times of trouble when everything depends 
on the judgment of the leaders and the crowd. During 
the last fifteen years there has been a long advance in so- 
briety in the trades-unions. It would be a great step in the 
rise of Labor if the unions refused to meet in any hall con- 
nected with a saloon or to pay their rent in the form of 
drinks. The churches could render no better service to 
Labor and to temperance than to assist the unions in secur- 
ing a labor temple in every city, or else the right to meet 
in the schoolhouses. If only the churches had the affection 
of the trades-unions, there would be still an easier way ; the 
churches have the buildings which the unions need ; their 
lecture rooms, let at a small rental, would solve the problem 
in many cases. At any rate, let us cheer organized Labor 
when it encourages its members to come out for abstinence, 
and when it recognizes that it has no part nor lot with that 
most voracious form of Capitalism, the Liquor Business. 



THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS 457 

I know of one large city where nothing but lemonade is 
served at the annual ball of the Barkeepers Union, and a 
number of the members of that union are total abstainers. 

But temperance is not the only virtue. No union is 
built up and maintained without financial expense and self- 
denial, without foresight and sagacity, without fortitude 
and suffering. They gather their members from all na- 
tionahties, parties, and religions, and by the warmth of a 
new fraternity melt down the old anti-fraternal immorali- 
ties inherited from other social relations. They teach their 
men to stand together in mutual defense against wrong 
and indignities, and though they may prove overloyal to the 
unworthy at times, surely the doctrine that ^Hhe injury of 
one is the concern of all" is higher than that individualistic 
doctrine, ^^ Every man for himself," which was first formu- 
lated in the question of Cain, ^^ Am I my brother's keeper ? " 

The men who are now organizing the working class are 
the same brand of men who organized our continent as 
pioneers. The heroisms and privations going on, out of 
sight of most of us, would be fit material for artists and 
poets, and may yet be their finest theme. A man who has 
no sympathetic comprehension of the rise of the working 
class may be very clever and widely informed, but he has 
no vital grasp either of the present or of the future ; he is 
not really a modern man ; nor is he a friend of men. The 
members of the working class individually are probably no 
better than those of other classes ; they may even average 
worse ; but collectively their class stands for a higher moral- 
ity than Business. It is one of the powers of the coming age.^ 
Its rise is one of the agencies essential to the christianizing 
of the social order. The pillar of cloud and fire which once 
moved before a nation when it broke from the servitude of 
Egypt and marched to the promised land of freedom and 
plenty, is now moving before the industrial working class. 

1 Part V, Chapter VII, of this book. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION AND THE CONVERSION OF 

THE STRONG 

In looking back over the field traversed in this book, it 
may seem to some as if our argument had fallen away 
from the high religious ground taken at the outset and had 
sagged down to the level of mere economic discussion. 
That impression would be superficial. This is a religious 
book from beginning to end. Its sole concern is for the 
Kingdom of God and the salvation of men. But the 
Kingdom of God includes the economic life ; for it means 
the progressive transformation of all human affairs by the 
thought and spirit of Christ. And a full salvation also in- 
cludes the economic life ; for it involves the opportunity 
for every man to realize the full humanity which God has 
put into him as a promise and a call ; it means a clean, rici, 
just, and brotherly life between him and his fellows; it 
means a chance to be single-hearted, and not to be coerced 
into a double life. I believe with the great historian Von 
Ranke that ^'the only real progress of mankind is contained 
in Christianity;'^ but that is true only when Christianity 
is allowed to become "the internal, organizing force of 
society.'' ^ We have scouted around our economic system, 
mined under it, and aeroplaned over it, because this is the 
fortress in which the predatory and unbrotherly spirit still 
lies intrenched with flags flying. It is the strategical key 
to the spiritual conquest of the modern world. 

But, on the other hand, no outward economic readjust- 

1 Fichte. 
458 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 459 

ments will answer our needs. It is not this thing or that 
thing our nation needs, but a new mind and heart, a new 
conception of the way we all ought to live together, a new 
conviction about the worth of a human life and the use God 
wants us to make of our own lives. We want a revolution 
both inside and outside. We want a moral renovation 
of public opinion and a revival of religion. Laws and con- 
stitutions are mighty and searching, but while the clumsy 
hand of the law fumbles at the gate below, the human soul 
sits in its turret amid its cruel plunder and chuckles. A 
righteous public opinion may bring the proudest sinner 
low. But the most pervasive scrutiny, a control which 
follows our actions to their fountain-head where the desires 
and motives of the soul are born, is exerted only by personal 
religion. 

But here again we are compelled to turn to our economic 
life. What if the public opinion on which we rely is tainted 
and purposely poisoned ? What if our religion is drugged 
and sick? The mammonism generated by our economic 
life is debilitating our religion so that its hand lies nerve- 
less on our conscience. Jesus told us it would be so. He 
put the dilemma flatly before us: ^^Ye cannot serve God 
and Mammon. If ye love the one, ye will hate the other." 
Every proof that we love Mammon with all our heart and 
all our soul raises the presumption that we have lost the 
love of God and are merely going through the motions 
when we worship him. We can measure the general apos- 
tasy by noting the wonder and love that follow every man 
who has even in some slight degree really turned his back 
on money. Men crowd around him like exiles around a 
man who brings them news from home. 

So we must begin at both ends simultaneously. We 
must change our economic system in order to preserve our 
conscience and our religious faith; we must renew and 
strengthen our religion in order to be able to change our 



( 



460 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

economic system. This is a two-handed job ; a one-handed 
man will bungle it. I have discussed the economic system 
in many chapters. In this closing chapter I shall talk about 
revolutionary religion and the need of converted men for 
the christianizing of the social order. 

When Archimedes discovered the laws of leverage, he 
cried A09 ttoO arco. He thought he could hoist the bulk of 
the earth from its grooves if only he had a standing place 
and a fulcrum for his lever. God wants to turn humanity 
right side up, but he needs a fulcrum. Every saved soul is 
a fixed point on which God can rest his lever. A divine 
world is ever pressing into this imperfect and sinful world, 
demanding admission and realization for its higher prin- 
ciples, and every inspired man is a channel through which 
the spirit of God can enter humanity. Every higher era 
must be built on a higher moral law and a purer experience 
of religion. Therefore the most immediate and constant 
need in christianizing the social order is for more religious 
individuals. 

I believe in the miraculous power of the human person- 
ality. A mind set free by God and energized by a great 
purpose is an incomputable force. Lord Shaftesbury was 
naturally a man of rather narrow type and without bril- 
liant gifts, but he gave himself with rehgious devotion to 
the cause of the oppressed classes, and so became one of the 
prime forces that swung England out of its carnival of 
capitalistic inhumanity.^ If we in the West have been 
correctly informed, the emancipation of China from the 
Manchu oligarchy has been chiefly due to the personal 
teaching and persuasion of one man, Sun Yat Sen, and 
the band of devoted men whom he raised up. One of 

^ The Duke of Argyll in 1885 said : "My Lords, the social reforms of the 
last century have not been mainly due to the Liberal Party. They have 
been due mainly to the influence, character, and perseverance of one man, 
Lord Shaftesbury." "That," said Lord SaKsbury, "is, I believe, a very 
true representation of the facts." 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 46 1 

the most fruitful intellectual movements in Germany ^ owes 
its beginning to one man, Professor Albert Eichhorn. His 
health has been so frail that he has published nothing but a 
sixteen-page pamphlet, but by personal conversations he 
inspired a number of able young minds, setting them new 
problems and fertilizing their thinking by his unselfish co- 
operation. The Democratic Convention of Baltimore in 
1 91 2 will stand out in our memory chiefly for the dramatic 
power of a single personality, strong in his sincerity and the 
trust of his countrymen, to wrest the control of his party 
at least for a time from evil hands. The history of the 
new democracy in recent years is the history of small 
groups of men of conviction and courage who stood to- 
gether for the new democratic measures. Often without 
official standing or financial backing they have shattered 
political redoubts that seemed impregnable. The Inquisi- 
tion of the Middle Ages and the Siberian exile system alike 
testify to the fact that the powers of tyranny are afraid of 
single-handed faith. 

This power of the individual rests on the social cohesion 
of mankind. Because we are bound together in unity of 
life, the good or the evil in one man's soul affects the rest. 
The presence of one heart that loves humanity shames the 
selfish spirit in others and warms the germs of civic devo- 
tion in the chilly soil, so that they grow and bear seed in 
turn. One brave soul rallies the timid and shakes the self- 
confidence of the prosperous. One far-seeing man can wake 
the torpid imagination of a community so that men see 
civic centers where they saw only real estate deals before. 
Hopes and convictions that were dim and vague become 
concrete, beautiful, and compelling when they take shape 
in a Hfe that lives them out. No torch is kindled of it- 
self, but when one man has lighted his at the altar fire of 
God, hundreds will take their light from him. So the faith 

^ The so-called religions geschichtliche Schule. 






462 ' CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

of the pioneers becomes socialized. The beHef of the few in 
time becomes a dogma which does not have to be proved 
over and over, but is a spiritual fund owned in common by a 
great social group. We need new dogmas that will raise 
the old to a new level and give them wider scope. ^^You 
have heard that it was said of old time — But I say unto 
you." ^ Such a lifting of moral conviction comes through 
those who can speak with authority because they speak 
for God. 

Create a ganglion chain of redeemed personalities in a 
commonwealth, and all things become possible. ^^What 
the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world." ^ 
The political events of 191 2 have furnished fresh proof that 
after individuals have preached their faith long enough, the 
common mind reaches the point of saturation, and moral 
conviction begins to be precipitated in solid layers. At such 
times even poor Judas thinks he would like to join the 
Messianic movement and be an apostle, and the rotten 
nobility of France follow the peasant girl : — 

"The White Maid, and the white horse, and the flapping banner 

of God; 
Black hearts riding for money ; red hearts riding for fame ; 
The Maid who rides for France, and the king who rides for 

shame ; 
Gentlemen, fools, and a saint riding in Christ's high name." ^ 

^^ Force and Right rule the world; Force till Right is 
ready." ^ The more individuals we have who love the 
Right for its own sake and move toward it of their own will, 
the less force and compulsion do we need. Here is one 
of the permanent functions of the Christian Church. It 
fiiust enlist the will and the love of men and women for 
God, mark them with the cross of Christ, and send them out 

1 Matt. V. 

2 The Epistle to Diognetus, Chapter Vl. Probably of the 2d century. 

3 Theodore Roberts, "The Maid." * Rochefoucauld. 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 463 

to finish up the work which Christ began. Is the Church 
supplying society with the necessary equipment of such 
personaKties ? Let us grant that it can never reach all; 
but is it making Christian revolutionists of those whom 
it does teach and control ? Jesus feared the proselyting 
efforts of the Jewish Church, because it made men worse 
than they were before.^ Some people to-day who carry 
the stamp of ecclesiastical religion most legibly are the 
most hopeless cases so far as social spirit and effort are con- 
cerned. The -spiritual efficiency of the Church is therefore 
one of the most serious practical questions for the chris- 
tianizing of the social order. We have shown ^ that the 
American churches have been to a large extent christian- 
ized in their fundamental organization, and every step in 
their redemption has facilitated social progress and increased 
the forces available for righteousness. But the process of 
christianizing the Church is not yet complete. 

To become fully Christian the churches must turn their 
back on dead issues and face their present tasks. There is 
probably not a single denomination which is not thrusting 
on its people questions for which no man would care and 
of which only antiquarians would know if the churches did 
not keep these questions alive. Our children sometimes 
pull the clothes of their grandparents out of old chests in 
the attic and masquerade in long-tailed coats and crino- 
lines. We religious folks who air the issues of the sixteenth 
century go through the same mummery in solemn earnest, 
while the enemy is at the gate. 

To become fully Christian and to do their duty by society 
the churches must get together. The disunion of the 
Church wastes the funds intrusted to it, wastes the abilities 
of its servants, and wastes the power of religious enthusiasm 
or turns it into antisocial directions. Civil war is always 
bad; it is worst when a nation is threatened by outside 

1 Matt, xxiii. 15. 2 p^rt III, Chapter II. 



464 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

enemies and the very existence of the fatherland is in danger. 
Some churches are so far apart on essential matters that 
union is hopeless for the present. But the great body of 
Protestant Christians in America is simply perpetuating 
trivial dissensions in which scarcely any present-day re- 
ligious values are at stake. 

To become fully Christian the Church must come out of 
its spiritual isolation. In theory and practice the Church 
has long constituted a world by itself. It has been governed 
by ecclesiastical motives and interests which are often re- 
mote from the real interests of humanity, and has almost 
uniformly set church questions ahead of social questions. 
It has often built a sound-proof habitation in which people 
could live for years without becoming definitely conscious 
of the existence of prostitution, child labor, or tenement 
crowding. It has offered peace and spiritual tranquillity 
to men and women who needed thunderclaps and light- 
nings. Like all the rest of us, the Church will get salvation 
by finding the purpose of its existence outside of itself, in 
the Kingdom of God, the perfect life of the race. 

To become fully Christian the Church must still further 
emancipate itself from the dominating forces of the present 
era. In an age of political despotism our fathers cut the 
Church loose from state control and state support, and 
therewith released the moral forces of progress. In an 
age of financial autocracy we must be far more watchful 
than we have been lest we bargain away the spiritual free- 
dom of the Church for opulent support. 

We do not want to substitute social activities for religion. 
If the Church comes to lean on social preachings and doings 
as a crutch because its religion has become paralytic, may 
the Lord have mercy on us all ! We do not want less reli- 
gion ; we want more ; but it must be a religion that gets its 
orientation from the Kingdom of God. To concentrate our 
efforts on personal salvation, as orthodoxy has done, or on 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 465 

soul culture, as liberalism has done, comes close to refined 
selfishness. All of us who have been trained in egotistic 
religion need a conversion to Christian Christianity, even 
if we are bishops or theological professors. Seek ye first the 
Kingdom of God and God's righteousness, and the salva- 
tion of your souls will be added to you. Our personality 
is of divine and eternal value, but we see it aright only when 
we see it as part of mankind. Our religious individuality 
must get its interpretation from the supreme fact of social 
solidarity. ^^ What hast thou that thou hast not received ? " 
Then what hast thou that thou dost not owe? Prayer 
ought to be a keen realization of our fellows, and not a for- 
ge tfulness of the world. A religion which realizes in God 
the bond that binds all men together can create the men 
who will knit the social order together as an organized 
brotherhood. 

This, then, is one of the most practical means for the 
christianizing of the social order, to multiply the number of 
minds who have turned in conscious repentance from the old 
maxims, the old admirations, and the old desires, and have 
accepted for good and all the Christian law with all that it 
implies for modern conditions. When we have a sufficient 
body of such, the old order will collapse like the walls of 
Jericho when the people ^'shouted with a great shout'' and 
^^ every man went straight before him" at the wall. No 
wrong can stand very long after the people have lost their 
reverence for it and begin to say ^^Booh" to it. 

Mending the social order is not like repairing a clock in 
which one or two parts are broken. It is rather like restor- 
ing diseased or wasted tissues, and when that has to be 
done, every organ and cell of the body is heavily taxed. 
During the reconstructive process every one of us must be 
an especially good cell in whatever organ of the social body 
we happen to be located. The tissues of society which it 
will be hardest to replace by sound growth are represented 

2H 



466 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

by the class of the poor and the class of the rich. Both are 
the product of ages of social disease. Christianizing the 
social order involves a sanitation of the defective and de- 
linquent classes, and of the classes living on unearned in- 
comes. All these need rehgious salvation. 

Suppose that we had successfully democratized our gov- 
ernment, made our laws just, and socialized our industries. 
We should still have with us a great body of people who have 
been crippled by war or industry, exhausted by child labor, 
drained of vitality in their mothers' wombs, unbalanced 
by alcoholism, or made neurotic by drug habits and sexual 
excesses. These would be the legacy bequeathed by the old 
order to the new, and surviving it for at least fifty years ; 
perhaps a hundred and fifty years. To-day we have that 
same body of defective people, constantly replenished and 
increasing in proportion to the population, hanging as a 
dead weight on society and on the working class especially. 
Whatever decreases that weight will give us elbow room for 
constructive work. The men and women who are helping 
to organize the defective members of the community so that 
they will get the maximum enjoyment out of their life and 
will present the minimum of hindrance to the present social 
transition, are not mere ministers of mercy, but construc- 
tive agents in the christianizing of the social order. If 
the selfish political henchmen who have run our public 
institutions can be replaced by regenerate intellects, our 
institutions of mercy will come out of their conspiracy of 
silence with the workers of cruelty, and we shall begin to 
find out who and what is throwing all this burden on the 
community. 

The problem of healing the social tissues is even more 
difficult in the case of those who break the laws. The old 
vindictive method of punishment has manifestly been in- 
effective. It is also unchristian ; for nothing is Christian 
that is not impelled by love and the desire to redeem. It 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 467 

becomes increasingly intolerable as our clearer psychological 
knowledge reminds us that we all in youth had the same 
wayward and brutal instincts, and that the majority of 
youthful criminals are just such immature human beings 
as our own children. We are realizing that the social 
disorder which we ourselves have helped to create is re- 
sponsible for a large part of our lawlessness. '^Society 
stands in the docket with every criminal who is there.'' ^ We 
need redeemed minds to deal with the delinquents of society. 
The men and women who deal with offenders should be the 
wisest and most Christ-like persons in the community. 
To save the young and wayward from losing their honor 
and to fan the dying fire of manhood in older criminals, is 
a great ministry of Christ, and Christian men ought to 
enter the police force with the sense of enlisting for God and 
their country. Within this generation our prisons should 
become redemptive institutions. But the consciousness 
of doing productive and honorable work is an essential 
condition of true salvation. Our penal institutions must 
become cooperative industrial establishments, where of- 
fenders can still support their families, lay by for the day 
when they will be thrown on their own resources, and, if 
possible, make restitution to those whom they have harmed. 
Our prisons must cease to be slave pens where the State 
lends its physical compulsion to some predatory indus- 
trial concern that wants to make big profits by undersell- 
ing outside labor, grafting on the State, and draining 
the prisoners. The participation of our States in contract 
prison labor is an indefensible business that ought to rob us 
of our sleep. 

The sanitation of the wealthy classes is another problem ; 
there we deal, not with the misery and waywardness of the 
poor, but with excessive material power. Some think it 
is idle to appeal to the rich to change their own lives ; it 

^ Victor Hugo. 



468 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

will have to be changed for them. I do not believe it. 
As a class they will doubtless go their way, eating and 
drinking, marrying and giving in marriage till the flood 
comes. But individuals will respond; more of them, I be- 
lieve, than in any similar situation in history before. Large 
groups of them have of late traveled miles in the direction 
of the fraternal life. 

Even if there are only a few, their coming counts. Some- 
thing happens when Moses leaves the palace of Pharaoh 
and joins the fortunes of his people. At a directors' meet- 
ing a single steady voice lifted for humanity and 6 per cent 
and against inhumanity and 8 per cent, cannot be dis- 
regarded forever, and that voice may mean health and 
decency for hundreds. Socialists justly say that there is 
no instance in history where one of the possessing classes 
has voluntarily given up its privileges. But is there any 
case where a poor and oppressed class has made a perma- 
nent and successful advance toward emancipation without 
help from individuals of the higher classes ? 

The desire for social esteem is one of the strongest and 
most subtle forces in social life. The individual always 
toils for whatever his class regards as the game. He will 
collect scalps for his belt, Philistine foreskins for a bridal 
gift to his beloved, silver cups or wreaths of wild olive as 
athletic trophies, funny titles, shady millions, — it's all the 
same thing. Now, a few self-confident men can create a 
new basis of esteem in their class and therewith change the 
direction of effort. If a few redeemed minds in a given busi- 
ness community begin to yawn at the stale game of piling 
up and juggling money, and plunge into the more fascinat- 
ing game of re-making a city, others will follow them. 
They cannot help it. God and the instinct of imitation 
will make them. 

Social institutions can be hit hardest by men who have 
grown up inside of them and know their weak spots. Phari- 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 469 

saism was hit by the Pharisee Paul ; monasticism by the 
monk Luther; the aristocracy of France by Count Mira- 
beau; alcohoHsm by John B. Gough; mihtarism by the 
ex-officer Tolstoy ; frenzied finance by Lawson ; the traction 
system by the traction magnate Tom L. Johnson. Even 
a few renegades from the rich are invaluable. It takes 
a sharp blow from the outside to crack an eggshell; the 
soft bill of a chick can break it from within. 

Every rich man who has taken the Christian doctrine 
of stewardship seriously has thereby expropriated himself 
after a fashion and become manager where he used to be 
owner. If a man in addition realizes that some part of his 
fortune consists of unearned money, accumulated by one 
of the forms of injustice which have been legalized by our 
social order, it becomes his business as a Christian and a 
gentleman to make restitution in some way. There is no 
sincere repentance without restitution and confession of 
wrong. If I discovered that I or my grandfather had, 
knowingly or unknowingly, by some manipulation or error 
of the survey, added to my farm a ten-acre strip which be- 
longed to my neighbor, could I go on harvesting the crops 
on it and say nothing ? It is true that restitution of wealth 
absorbed from great communities through many years is a 
complicated matter, and that the giving away of large sums 
is dangerous business which may do as much harm as good. 
Yet some way must be found. Since the rich have gained 
their wealth by appropriating pubhc functions and by using 
the taxing powers which ought to belong to the community 
alone, the fittest way of restitution is to undertake pubhc 
service for which the State in its present impoverished con- 
dition has no means, such as the erection and running of pub- 
lic baths, playgrounds, and civic centers. But the moral 
value of such gifts would be almost incalculably increased 
if some acknowledgment were made that these funds were 
drawn from the people and belonged to them. Every time 



470 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

any rich man has indicated that he felt troubled in mind 
about his right to his wealth, the public heart has warmed 
toward him with a sense of forgiveness. If some eminent 
man should have the grace and wisdom to make a confession 
of wrong on behalf of his whole class, it would have a pro- 
found influence on public morality and social peace. 

If a rich man has a really redeemed conscience and in- 
tellect, the best way to give away his unearned wealth would 
be to keep it and use it as a tool to make the recurrence of 
such fortunes as his own forever impossible. The Salva- 
tion Army sets a saved girl to save other girls, and that is 
the best way to keep her saved. By the same token a man 
whose forefathers made their money in breweries or dis- 
tilleries ought to use it to fight alcoholism ; a man who made 
his by land speculation should help to solve the housing 
question or finance the single-tax movement ; a man who 
has charged monopoly prices for the necessaries of life 
should teach the people to organize cooperative societies; 
and so forth. 

Men and women of the wealthy class who have been con- 
verted to the people as well as to God can perform a ser- 
vice of the highest value by weakening the resistance which 
their classes will inevitably offer to the equalization of 
property. That resistance has been by far the most im- 
portant cause why humanity has been so backward in its 
social and moral development. The resistance of the upper 
classes has again and again blocked and frustrated hopeful 
upward movements, kept useful classes of the people in 
poverty and degradation, and punished the lovers of human- 
ity with martyrdom of body or soul. The cross of Christ 
stands for the permanent historical fact that the men who 
have embodied the saving power of (jod have always been 
ill treated by those who profited by sin. Reference has 
been made to the work of Lord Shaftesbury.^ In Lanca- 

^Hodder, "The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury," 
3 vols., 1886. 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 47 1 

shire alone he found 35,000 children under thirteen years 
of age, many of them only five or six years old, working 
fourteen and fifteen hours a day. It took Shaftesbury and 
his friends fourteen years of agitation to get a ten-hour bill 
passed, and even then it was so impeded by legal difficulties 
that successive Acts, chiefly instigated by him, were re- 
quired to give it effect, and the ten-hour standard was not 
fully secured till 1874. He and his friends were loaded 
with denunciation and insult for years. Few clergymen 
stood by him; they were indifferent, or cowed by the 
cotton lords. Men whose names are revered because they 
led the fight of the capitalistic class against landed wealth, 
Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone, were at that time the malig- 
nant opponents of the protection of the working class. 
Machiavelh said that men will forgive the murder of their 
parents more easily than the spoliation of their property. 

Of course the road is smoother since democracy has 
leveled it. In 1567 under the Duke of Alba a man was 
condemned to death for the treasonable assertion that 
''we must obey God rather than man." It would probably 
be safe to say that now, especially if chapter and verse were 
quoted. But the opposition of the powerful classes against 
every movement that seriously threatens their privileges 
is one of the most formidable facts with which we have to 
reckon. All the dynasties of Europe combined against 
the first French Republic. All capitalistic governments 
would combine to trip and cripple the first Socialist Re- 
public. If our Interests found their control of government 
really in danger, it would be comparatively easy to embroil 
our nation in war ; that is always the last trick of a totter- 
ing dynasty. Therewith the President would be vested 
with almost dictatorial powers ; martial law could be pro- 
claimed wherever needed; State rights could be overrid- 
den; and the popular movement could be forcibly sup- 
pressed as treasonable. 



472 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

A minority of wealthy men and women, who stand for 
the democratic American ideals and sincerely beheve in 
the necessity and justice of the impending social changes, 
would do a great deal to avert the heading up of that spirit 
of anarchy among the rich and to prevent such a coup d^etat, 
which would be the beginning of the end for our nation. 

I estimate that about two thirds of my readers have 
read the foregoing pages about the conversion of the rich 
with a smiling sense of unreality, as the amiable dreams of 
a ^-good man." The late Duke of Cambridge had a way 
of talking aloud to himself, even in church. One Sunday 
the lesson about Zacchaeus was being read, who gave away 
half of his goods to the poor. *^Gad," said the Duke, ''I 
don't mind subscribing, but half is too much." The rich 
young ruler was asked to give the whole and went away sor- 
rowful. He wanted the goods, but the price staggered 
him. He missed his chance by not being game. He stood 
shivering on the shore and feared the plunge from which 
he would have come up in a tingle of life. He might have 
traveled day by day in the company of Jesus, with the 
Master's words in his memory, his eye on him, his friend- 
ship coaxing every good thing in the man's heart up and 
out. He might have become an apostle, one of the guid- 
ing spirits of the young Church, handling growing responsi- 
bilities, seeing the world, facing kings and mobs, tasting 
the fullness of life. His name might to-day be a household 
word wherever the Gospels are read, and millions of boys 
might be named after him as after John and James. In- 
stead of that he probably lived and died as the richest 
man of his little Galilean town, carrying in a frozen heart 
the dead seed of a great life, unless, indeed, some Roman 
official squeezed him dry or the Jewish War did for him by 
force what he would not do freely. 

So far from being dreams these suggestions are hard 
sense. If I were rich myself, I could state them far mo?^ 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 473 

strongly. The call to place unearned wealth at the serv- 
ice of the people's cause is to-day the daring short cut to 
great experiences, to the love and confidence of all good 
men, and almost the only way to fame open to most rich 
men. It is the '^open but unfrequented path to immortal- 
ity." ^ It is also the path to peace of heart and the joy of 
life. The sacrifices demanded by a religious conversion 
always seem sore and insuperable, but every religious man 
will agree that after the great surrender is made, there is 
a radiant joy that marks a great culmination of life. All 
the remaining years are ennobled. God is the great joy. 
Whenever we have touched the hem of his garment by 
some righteous action, we get so much satisfaction that we 
can be well content even if we get no further reward or 
recognition, or even if we suffer hurt and persecution for 
it. Not the memory of power wielded, not even the memory 
of love, is so sweet as the consciousness that we once suf- 
fered for a great cause. When Thomas Jefferson gave 
directions about his epitaph, he made no reference to having 
been Governor, Secretary of State, Vice President, and 
President of the United States. He did boast of having 
been the father of the University of Virginia, the author 
of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Virginia 
statute guaranteeing religious liberty. 

^^Now I saw in my dream, that the highway up which 
Christian was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, 
and that wall is called Salvation. Up this way therefore 
did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, 
because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came 
at a place somewhat ascending ; and upon that place stood 
a Cross .... So I saw in my dream that just as Christian 
came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his 

1 John Howard died in Russian Tartary, trying to find the cause for the 
plague and a remedy for it. On his grave in St. Paul's Cathedral are the 
■>rds : ''He took an open but unfrequented path to immortality. '^ 



474 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

shoulders and fell from off his back. . . . Then was Chris- 
tian glad and lightsome and spoke with a merry heart/' 
It is a sober fact that for many a Christian the load that 
burdens his soul is unearned money. If he returned it in 
some wise and redemptive way to the people from whom it 
came, he would once more own his soul, be a friend of all 
men, and a happy child of God. It is truly at the Cross 
alone that freedom of the soul is won. 

I call on the old to make a great act of expiation and 
love before they go hence. Why will they descend to join 

^Hhe melancholy souls of those 
Who lived wi thou ten infamy or praise. 
Commingled are they with the caitiff choir 
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been 
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self." ^ 

In 1909 Chauchard, the proprietor of the Magazins du 
Louvre, one of the great department stores of Paris, died, 
leaving behind a fortune of $20,000,000, a colossal fortune 
for French conditions. His 8000 employees, who had 
helped him make this money, had been given to under- 
stand that he would leave them at least five millions. In- 
stead, he left them $600,000, the amount of their annual 
tip. To the poor he left $40,000. His casket of precious 
wood and bronze, made under his care, cost $100,000 ; his 
shroud was cloth of gold ; the pearl buttons on his waist- 
coat were valued at $100,000; opera singers performed 
at the burial service; the Grand Cross of the Legion of 
Honor was borne on a cushion before the hearse. Paris 
turned out to give him the honor that he seemed to have 
deserved. Grand stands had been built; hundreds of 
thousands lined the roads to the Pere la Chaise to see what 
they called the Chauchard Carnival, a carnival of contempt 
and mockery. With blasts from motor horns, whistles, 

1 Dante, "Inferno," III, 34. 



< 



THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION 475 

hisses, shouts, and catcalls, the plumed hearse swept 
along. The efforts of the police to check the roar of exe- 
cration was in vain. This dramatic burst of emotion, 
with its mingling of selfish anger and righteous moral in- 
dignation, is prophetic of the judgment that democracy 
will pass on selfish wealth and display in coming days when 
it becomes more class conscious. 

Set over against that the verdict on a Roman patriot : 
^'In the following year died Publius Valerius, by common 
consent the foremost man in the arts of war and peace. 
His fame was immense ; his private property was so scanty 
that there was not enough to pay the expense of his funeral. 
He was buried at public cost. The matrons mourned him 
as they mourned Brutus." ^ 

When a few princes and cities in 1530 avowed their 
faith in the principles of the Reformation by presenting 
the Augsburg Confession, Prince Wolfgang von Anhalt was 
warned not to sign because it would bring down on him the 
anger of the Emperor Charles V. The old man replied : 
^'Many a time have I ridden to war to help my friends; 
so now for once I'll take horse for my Lord Christ." 

But the call is, not to the old alone. It is to all. '^The 
Kjngdom of God is at hand. Therefore repent and believe 
in the Gospel." I wish the Student Volunteers could add 
another pledge by which those who do not go to the foreign 
field would bind themselves to give some term of their 
youth at least to social work in the trenches. If necessary, 
young men and women should be willing to secure their 
freedom for poorly paid work by postponing marriage. 
Childless men and women are under a special law to make 
good to the race what they are not putting into the bearing 
and rearing of children. Those whose love has suffered 
a great loss should fill the gap with a wider love, and do 
for humanity what their loved one would have been worth 

iLivy, II, 16. 



476 CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER 

to his fellow-men if he had lived. Those who have suffered 
through some social sin can give a meaning and value to 
their suffering by making it serve the redemption of the 
race from that sin. For instance, if a man has borne the 
curse of alcohol or drug poison in himself or in the degrada- 
tion of a friend, he is under holy bonds to warn others and 
stamp out that evil; if a woman has felt sex sin cutting 
into her heart or her body, she has a special call from God 
to save humanity from that silent ravager, and if she is 
deaf to the call, her suffering, in place of being part of God's 
salvation, becomes a mere waste and loss. On the ancient 
minster at Basle are two sculptured groups : St. Martin 
cutting his cloak in two with his sword to clothe a beggar, 
and St. George spurring his horse against the dragon that 
devastated the country. Every Christian man should 
embody both kinds of sainthood in one life. 

"Trumpeter, sound for the splendor of God ! 
Sound the music whose name is law. 
Whose service is perfect freedom still. 
The order august that rules the stars ! 
Bid the anarchs of night withdraw. 
Too long the destroyers have worked their will. 
Sound for the last, the last of the wars ! 
Sound for the heights that our fathers trod, 
When truth was truth and love was love. 
With a hell beneath, but a heaven above. 
Trumpeter, rally us, rally us, rally us, 
On to the City of God." 



INDEX 



Ability, suppression of, under unjust con- 
ditions, 333-335- 

Accidents, industrial, the community's 
support of expenses of, 228; figures 
of, 242-243 ; increase of, with spread 
of power machinery, 245 ; need of 
scientific record of, 415; compensatfon 
in case of, 415. 

Accounting, uniform, 3. 

Accumulation of wealth, extent of justi- 
fication for, 297. 

Addams, Jane, quoted, 249, 266-267 ; 
*'A New Conscience and an Ancient 
Evil," by, 265. 

Adulteration, of goods, 206-210; of 
food, lowers physical efficiency of 
working people, 246; of food, an 
illustration of the clashing of private 
interest with public welfare, 276; 
avoidance of, in case of drugs, by pub- 
lic ownership, 444. 

Advertisements, disfiguring, 253. 

Advertising, effects of, on character, 210- 
212. 

^Esthetic life, treatment of, by industry 
and commerce, 252 ff. 

Age, increase in conservatism with in- 
creasing, 32 ; saving for, 342, 343. 

Aged, care of the, an unsolved national 
problem. 416; an act of expiation and 
love asked of, before death, 474-475. 

Agricultural land, proposed socializa- 
tion of, 424. 

Alcoholism, in idle society, 302 ; com- 
plete break needed between working 
class and, 456. See Liquor trade. 

America, difference in attitude of social- 
ism toward religion in Europe and in, 
108-109, 398-400; debt of education 
in, to Christianity, 146-147; inequal- 
ity and privilege in, SSS'^Z^- 

American Federation of Catholic So- 
cieties, anti-sociaUst propaganda of , 27. 



American Liberty and Property Associa- 
tion, declaration of principles of, 350- 
351. 

Amusement and social pleasure, public 
provision for, 440-442. 

Anabaptists, the, 83. 

Andover House, 20 n. 

Andover Seminary, pioneer in study of 
social problems at theological semi- 
naries, 20 n. 

Anglo-Saxon communities, blending of 
religion and freedom in, 154. 

Anhalt, Prince Wolfgang von, story of, 

475- 

Anthracite coal monopoly, 229, 424. 

Anticlericalism in continental social- 
ism, 109-110. 

Apocalypticism, development and sig- 
nificance of, among the Hebrews, 54- 
55 ; still a living fcrce, as shown by the 
Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse of 
John, 55; how it came to dominate 
the Christian view of future history, 
55-56; necessity of the idea of the 
Kingdom of God to get rid of, to 
meet demands of the modem social 
world, 56 ; pre-Christian Utopian form 
of the Kingdom-of-God hope held by, 
65; revival of, and new meaning, in 
twelfth century, 83-84. 

Arbitration, boards of, 454. 

Argyll, Duke of, quoted, 460 n. 

Aristocracy, building up of a capital- 
istic, 356 ; the democracy of labor vs., 

357. 

Arnold of Brescia, 85. 

Art, commercialism a smothering atmos- 
phere for, 257 ff. ; close relation of, to 
the general social system of production, 
259; the hand of the middleman in, 
259-260. 

Aryan village communities, 375-376; 
survivals of, in ancient Greece and 
Rome and modem Switzerland, 377, 
378. 



477 



478 



INDEX 



Association, laws and habits of, taught 
by capitalism, 235-236. See Cooper- 
ation. 

Astorization vs. socialization of New York 
real estate, 422. 

Atheism among socialists, iii n.; not an 
essential of socialist thought, 403-404. 

Athens, favorable conditions of life in 
ancient, 257, 345. 

Augustine, philosophy of history devel- 
oped by, 79. 

Austin, Pa., dam disaster, 287-288. 

Austraha, minimum wage boards in, 
414 n. ; public ownership in, 439. 

Autocracy, business the last intrench- 
ment of, 194-195, 356. 

Automobiles, benefits and otherwise of. 



211. 



B 



Babcock, "Rise of American Nation- 
ality," by, cited, 279. 

Baptist Church, stand of, on social ques- 
tions, 16; Social Service Commission 
of, 17. 

Barnard, Kate, 283. 

Basle, cooperative societies in, 385 n. 

Bates, Katharine Lee, hymn by, 447. 

Beauty, disregard of commerciahsm for, 
252 ff. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, 304. 

Beef, prices of, under monopoly condi- 
tions, 216. 

Begbie, Harold, "Twice-Born Men" of, 
115 n. 

Belgium, protest against plural suffrage 
in, 189, 194. 

Benevolent-employer theory, 356-357. 

Berkeley, Governor, on education, 143. 

Bethlehem steel strike, 186-187. 

Beyschlag, "Leben Jesu," quoted, 67. 

Bible, social teachings in the, 43. 

Bible classes, study of social teachings of 
Jesus by, 11. 

Bliss, W. D. P., 9. 

Books and bookstores under material- 
istic sway of capitalism, 316. 

Boston Common, quoted, 395. 

Boys' Work in Men and Religion For- 
ward Movement, 20. 

Brooks, Phillips, 304. 

Brother, meaning accompanying word, 
128. 



Brotherhood of man, Jesus' promulga- 
tion of doctrine of, 59-60. 

Brotherhood of the Kingdom, an early 
organization of social Christianity, 

23, 94- 

Bryan, W. J., 304; tribute to power of 
personahty of, 461. 

Buffalo, railway station at, 258. 

Bunyan, John, and the religion of other- 
worldliness, 75 ; characteristics of 
"Pilgrim's Progress" as a classical 
expression of personal religion, iii- 
112; " Pilgrim' s Progress ' ' quoted, 

473-474. 

Burial customs, need of community 
action regarding, 444-445. 

Burke, Edmund, quotation from, 330. 

;^usiness, the source of our economic 
troubles, 156; analysis of develop- 
ment and evolution of, 157-162 ; 
adjustment of, into a capital class and 
a labor class, 163-165 ; the speculative 
method in, 165-166, 210; benefit from 
cooperation in, 170-171; system of 
warfare in, 1 71-17 2; desirabihty of 
abandoning competitive system in, 
172-179; the autocratic principle 
still in possession of, 194-195; posi- 
tion of the middleman in, 202 ff . ; the 
matter of fraud in, 206 ff. ; inestimable 
effects of, on standards of morality, 
212-213; effects of entrance of mo- 
nopoly element into, 214 ff. ; influ- 
ences for good brought to bear on, 239 ; 
influences for bad of, 239-240; strong 
fighting quahties of, 240-241 ; causes 
of vice traceable to, 263-271. 



Calvin, John, 86, no, 402. 

Calvinism, dogmatism of socialism and 
of, no; the start given to capitaHsm 
by, 211-212; early errors of, 402. 

Cambridge, Duke of, story of, 472. 

Canadian Northwest, land taxation in 
the, 393. 

Capitahsm, development of system of, in 
business, 159-165; derives its strength 
and value from use of cooperative 
principle, 170; the two classes under, 
180; moral values of, 235 ff . ; laws, 
habits, and benefits of cooperation 



I 



INDEX 



479 



taught by, 235-236; overpraise of, by 
its defenders, 236-237 ; misdirection of 
powers of human goodness under, 237- 
238 ; curbing of immorahties of, by the 
State, 239; law and morals broken 
down by, if in its way, 239-240; re- 
sponsibility of, for industrial accidents 
and diseases, 242 ff. ; other examples 
of waste of life due to, 246-251; dis- 
regard of beauties of nature by, 252- 
253 ; abuse of natural resources by, 
253-254; dangers to the home from, 
262-271; supreme selfishness of, 272- 
290 ; summing up of case of Christianity 
against, 311-315; spirit generated by, 
antagonistic to the spirit cf Christi- 
anity, 315; literature, art, education, 
and the professions invaded and 
dragged down by, 316-319; the escape 
of religion and the Church from, 319- 
323; ideal of a benevolent employer 
held by, 356; public cooperation hin- 
dered by, 370-371- 

Capital and labor, present position of, 
163-165. 

Cathohc Church. See Roman Catholic 
Church. 

Cemeteries, public, 445. 

Central Park, New York, 423. 

Ceremonial, waste of religious power in 
overdoing, 97-98; justification of the 
turning away from mere, 106-107. 

Ceremonial religion, indifference of Jesus 
to, 61-62. 

Charitable agencies, commercialism and, 
283. 

Charity, conservative attitude of Mis- 
souri Synod of Lutheran Church to- 
ward, 24-25. 

Chauchaid, French merchant, story of, 

474-475. 

Chautauqua, socialism in, 396. 

Chesterton, G. K., quoted, 307-308. 

Chicago Vice Commission, 4, 188. 

Child labor, predominance of selfish in- 
terest in, 276, 413 ; Lord Shaftesbury's 
work in connection with, 470-471. 

Childless, social obligations of the, 475. 

Child hfe, waste of, 98. 

Children, improvement in status of, 131- 
132 ; school uniforms for, 446. 

Christian economic order, qualities and 
characteristics of a, 372 ff. ; funda- 



mentals of, found in fraternal com- 
munities of early and modern times, 

375-383. 

Christianity, the social, of Jesus, 48-68; 
long eclipse of the early social ideal of, 
69 ; reasons for, 69 ff . ; influence of, on 
family relations, 134-136; effects of, 
as shown by the Church, 136-142 ; and 
the educational system, 142-147; in- 
fluence of, on politics, 147-154; a 
passion for freedom the distinctive 
mark of genuine, 197 ; judgment of th 
business man by, 200-201 ; recapitula 
tion of the case of, against capitalism, 
311-315; spiritual antagonism be- 
tween genius of, and genius of capi- 
talistic business, 321-323; is a strain 
of higher social life, 378-379. See 
Social Christianity. 

"Christianity and the Social Crisis," 
cited on the Hebrew prophets, 50; 
criticism of, by I. M. Haldeman, 56 n. ; 
cited, 70 n., 78, 136, 142, 264, 292, 320. 

Christianizing the social order, meaning 
of, 125. 

Christian Sociology, chairs of, at theo- 
logical seminaries, 21. 

Church, response of the, to the social 
awakening, 7; efforts of, to get in 
touch with union labor, 12 ; formulation 
of new social convictions in a creed by, 
21 ; social awakening of, far from 
complete, 24; reasons for slowness in 
acceptance of the social mission, 28- 
29 ; grandeur of possibilities open to, 
in the social field, 29; social conserva- 
tism and the, 3,^ ff. ; in the past the 
most conservative of institutions, 34- 
35 ; attitude of the Roman, the Ger- 
man State, and the Church of England 
toward veneration of institutions, 34- 
36; vital question for social progress 
as to attitude American churches will 
take, 36-39 ; problem presented to the, 
as to meeting the present social problem, 
41-47 ; reasons found in the ascendency 
of, for the eclipse of the social hope, 
76-81 ; social efficiency of the early 
Christian, 77-78 ; comes to regard itself 
as the Kingdom of God, rather than an 
agency to create the, 78-79 ; a fractional 
part of the Kingdom ideal really em- 
bodied by the, 79-80; method of 




48o 



INDEX 



arriving at a just estimate of social 
value of, in the past, 80-81 ; changes 
worked in, by the Protestant Reforma- 
tion, 86-87 ; discarding of old religious 
forms of, upon a new awakening of 
spiritual life, 106-107; as an example 
of the christianizing process, 136-142 ; 
dangers to the, from modern condi- 
tions, 142 ; conditions under which it 
may become a dangerous power, 273; 
escape of, from the materialistic spirit 
generated by capitalism, 319 £f. ; early 
stand taken by CathoHc, against eco- 
nomic tendencies which have resulted in 
capitalism, 379 ; antagonism, of social- 
ism to the, 398; the completion of 
the christianizing of, 463-465. 

Churches, principles of, contrasted with 
principles of the working class, 455-456. 

Church and Labor, church commissions 
on, 16-17. 

Church Association for the Advancement 
of the Interests of Labor, 22. 

Church of England, conservatism of, 36. 

Cities, socialization of property in, 422 ff. 

Civil service reform, 439-440. 

Civil War, scandals connected with army 
contracts during, 280. 

Class selfishness, 30-32 ; under feudalist ic 
regime and its remnants in modern 
States, 148-150. 

Clearing House Association, New York, 
concentration of control of, 286. 

Clemens, S. L., 304. 

Cleveland, railway station at, 258. 

Coal, socialization of property in, 424, 

443. 
Coffee, profits from, under monopoly 

conditions, 216. 
Colleges, fraternal community life of, 

382-383 ; socialism in, 396. 
Collier^s Weekly, quoted, 243 n. 
Colonies, communistic, 381-382. 
Commercialism, disregard of, for the 

aesthetic side, 252 ff. 
Commission, government by, 3, 362. 
Commissions on Church and Labor of 

Protestant Episcopal Church, 16-17. 
Committee on Standards of Living and 

Labor, "Social Standards for Indus- 
try " of, 413 n. 
Common good, private interests set over 

against, imder capitalism, 272-290. 



Commons, John R. , "Distribution of 
Wealth" by, cited. 230, 347; on early 
immigrants to America, 355. 

Communistic democracies, primitive 
Aiyan, 375-376; of ancient Greece and 
Rome, 377 ; remnants of, in Swiss can- 
tonal governments, 378; medieval 
monasteries as, 380-381; in colonies 
founded by evangelical sects, 381-382 ; 
examples offered by college and uni- 
versity communities, 382-383. 

Community Extension in Men and Re- 
ligion Forward Movement, 20. 

Community hfe and pubHc spirit, 430 ff. 

Company stores, 358. 

Competition, economic inefficiency of, 
170 n. ; warfare in business caused by, 
171— 172 ; the reign of, is a reign of fear, 
i73~i74,* certain salutary forms of 
human, 174-175; difference between 
commercial, and other forms, 175 ff. ; 
the stakes too large for safety, 175-176 ; 
the prizes are monetary only, 176; 
for various reasons not "good sport," 
176-177; in theory is still the funda- 
mental article in capitalistic nations' 
creed, but in practice is being aban- 
doned, 177—178; urgent reasons for 
getting rid of, 178-179; a wrong eco- 
nomic relation implied by, because 
opposed to fraternity, 365-367 ; im- 
possibility of application of, to natural 
monopolies, 435-436. 

Conciliation, boards of, 454. 

Congregational Council, pronouncement 
of, on social questions, 16. 

Congregationalists, Social Service De- 
partment of, 17. 

Conservation Movement, the, 254. 

Conservation of life, 412 ff. 

Conservatism, social, as an obstacle to 
progress, 30; influence of class selfish- 
ness on, 30-32; influence of increas- 
ing conservatism of age on, 32 ; power 
of institutionalized tradition on, 32- 
2,3 ; the Church and, 33-39. 

Constitution of United States, urgent 
need of revision of, 33. 

Cooperation, the effectiveness of, 169; 
constitutes an organized social expres- 
sion, 169-170; capitalism as a teacher 
of, 235-236; competitive capitalism 
the opposite of, 311; offers the true 



i 



INDEX 



481 



economic basis for fraternity, 366-367 ; 
evolutionary process of, now going on, 
as illustrated by business, 368-369; 
obstruction of, by capitalism, 370- 
371; in early community life, 375- 
376. 

Cooperative associations, extent and 
scope of modern, 385 ; the corporation 
contrasted with, 386-387 ; high ethical 
quality of new principle represented 
by, 387-388; importance as an aid in 
rise of the working class, 451. 

Cooperative commonwealth, proofs of 
possibility of a, 369-370. 

Corporal punishment in schools, 144. 

Corporation, evils of the, 184 ff. ; de- 
personahzing of the master by, 312; 
stride made toward social cooperation 
by the, 368-369; the cooperative 
associations contrasted with, 386- 
387 ; problem of resociaHzing the mo- 
nopolistic, 425-426. 

Corporations are states within the State, 
with many interests opposed to the 
common interest, 274-275. 

Corporation lawyers, 436-437. 

Corruption in politics, government, and 
judiciary, 280-283. 

Cost of living, increase in, 1-2 ; effects of, 
on the family as an institution, 136; 
an artificially increased, means lowered 
physical efl&ciency of working people, 
246-247. 

Courts, federal, ineffectiveness of, 3 ; 
taint of commercialism on the, 281- 
282 ; need of reform of the, 332-333. 

Crematories, public, 445. 

Crises, ability of money power to create, 
286. 

D 

Dairies, municipal, 443-444. 
Dante, influence of the religion of other- 
worldliness shown by, 74; quoted, 

474. 

Dawn, the, Socialist paper, 9. 

Death rate of tenement dwellers, 416. 

Decker, George P., pamphlet by, 425 n. 

Deforestation, wasteful, 98, 421. 

Democracy, religious foundation for 
modern, laid by Jesus, 60-61 ; mean- 
ing of modern, is the realization of the 
social ideal of Christianity, 83; atti- 



tude of the Protestant Reformation 
toward, 85-86 ; the adolescence of, in 
the eighteenth century, 88; vitality 
given to the Kingdom ideal by the 
modern enthusiasm for, 91 ; the need 
of industrial, 198-199; a failure in 
so far as crippled and incomplete, 353 ; 
benefits gained from economic democ- 
racy, 353 ff . ; historic stages in the 
progress of, 355-356. See Industrial 
democracy. 

Democratic Convention, Baltimore, 
power of a single personality in, 461. 

Denmark, cooperative societies in, 385 n. 

Devine, Edward T., quoted, 283. 

Direct legislation, 428. 

Direct nominations, 428. 

Direct primaries, 282, 362. 

Diseases, occupational, 243, 244 ; pub- 
lic support of victims of, 415. 

Domestic service, temptations to women 
employed in, 267. 

Donation of Constantine, the, 139. 

Dowd, Quincy L., article by, cited, 445. 

Dress, relation of commerce to beauty 
illustrated by, 255 ; of society women, 
302. 

Drinking in idle society, 302. 

Drugs, public management of trade in, 
444. 

E 

Economic democracy, stages in progress 
toward, 355-356 ; is the only alterna- 
tive for an aristocracy of superior 
persons, 357 ; socialism and trades- 
unionism two great movements push- 
ing toward, 357 ; necessity of training 
workingmen for, 359; as a moral test 
of employers, 360-361 ; elimination of 
the middleman under the, 361 ; ad- 
vances in the, involve fights for politi- 
cal democracy, 361-362; the people 
handicapped by their morality in 
struggle for, 362-363. 

Economic system, analysis of our present, 
156 ff. ; position of the middleman in, 
202 ff . ; cheapness and waste of life 
under, 242-251 ; a direct cause of prosti- 
tution, 265-267 ; included in the 
Kingdom of God, 458; involved in 
Jesus' saying concerning God and 
Mammon, 459. See Capitalism. 



21 



482 



INDEX 



Education, taint of capitalism extended 
to, 316; the spread of, necessary to 
rise of the working class, 452-453. 

Educational system, the christianizing 
process applied to, 142-147. 

Edwards, R. H., " Studies in American 
Social Conditions" pubhshed by, 11 n. 

Eichhorn, Albert, power of the human 
personality illustrated by, 460-461. 

Ely, Richard T., 9; cited and quoted, 
290, 438 ; on socialism, 401 ; on social- 
ization of monopolies, 425 n. ; on 
corruptness of private management of 
railways, 437. 

Employment, the right to, 347-351. 

Employment bureaus, need of connected 
system of, 452. 

Engels, F., work by, cited, 239. 

England, distinction between socialism 
in, and continental sociahsm, 109, 399- 
400; governmental aid of working 
classes in, 346; land taxation in, 392- 
393 ; minimum wage boards in, 414 n, ; 
Public Trustee Act in, 434-435. 

Episcopal Church, work of, concerning 
social problems, 16-17; leading part 
taken by, in struggle against industrial 
extortion, 22. 

Equality, fallacy of, in America, 335; 
democracy stands for more, between 
men, 363; not absolute, but approxi- 
mate wanted, 363-364. 

Europe, alienation of working classes 
from religion in, 108; hostihty of 
socialism to religion in, 108- no. 

Evangelism, criticism of, 113-114. 

Evolutionary ideas, significance of spread 
of, to modern religious thought, 90. 

Express companies, the middleman under 
monopoly conditions illustrated by, 
217-219; example of partial socializa- 
tion of transportation furnished by, 
420. 

F 

Faith, importance of a great religious, 40 ; 
reason for especial need of the present 
generation for a, 40-41 ; dependence 
of our moral efl&ciency on our, 41; 
question as to what great faith will 
inspire religious minds in social re- 
generation, 41 ff. ; historic Christianity 
should be found to offer some great 



word of, 47; the one required, 
found in the Christianity of Jesus, 96. 

"Faith and the Future," Mazzini's, 
quoted, 41. 

False weights and measures, 207. 

Family, an example of the application of 
the christianizing process, 128 ff . ; the 
patriarchal, 129-130 ; evolution of the, 
130-134; influence of Christianity on 
the Graeco-Roman, 134-135 ; dangers 
to, from modern disintegrating forces, 
136; love of, a motive for acquiring 
wealth, 302 ; reaction of wealth on, 
302-303. 

Farming, revolution of business of, 159- 
160. 

Fashion, tyranny of, in matters of dress, 
255-257- 

Father, significance of word, 128. 

Federal Council of the Churches of 
Christ, organization and platform of, 
14-15- 

Feudalism, inequality and privilege 
essentials of, 148-150; analogy be- 
tween features of the industrial age 
and, 273. 

Fitch, John A., cited, 287. 

Force, use of, by strikers, 191-192, 408- 
409. 

Foreign missions, lessons from, 18-19, 28, 
90-91. 

Forests, waste of, 98, 421. 

"For God and the People, Prayers of the 
Social Awakening," mentioned, 95 n. 

Francis of Assisi, St., Ss, 84, 293. 

Fraternity, economic basis for, 365 ff . ; 
the ideal of cooperative, found in 
socialism, 367 ; in primitive de- 
mocracies, 375-377; in Swiss com- 
munities, 378; in medieval monasteries, 
380-381 ; in communistic colonies, 
381-382 ; in colleges and universities, 
382-383. 

Fraud, in business, 206 ff . ; in connection 
with Civil War contracts, 280. 

Freedom, an essential condition of real 
manhood, good for its own sake, 196- 
197 ; economic, an essential part of 
human, 197-198; man's narrow mar- 
gin of, 249 ; the life breath of a chris- 
tianized personality and the condition 
of a christianized social order, 352-353 ; 
conditions as to, at the nation's begin- 



INDEX 



483 



ning, 354-355 ; the constant cry for 

more, 355-356. 
Free love, 270, 403. 
Froude, James A., quoted, 191. 
Funerals, municipal regulation of, 445. 



Gas, profits from, under monopoly con- 
ditions, 215-216; public ownership of, 

433, 434- 
George, David Lloyd, quoted, 306-307 ; 

government aid secured to working 

classes by, 346. 
George, Henry, 289; the Single Tax 

gospel of social salvation preached by, 

391-394 ; author's personal tribute to, 

394. 

Germany, conservative creed of State 
Churches of, 35-36 ; attitude of Chris- 
tian socialists in, toward the King- 
dom-of-God ideal, 91 ; class divisions in 
educational system of, 143 ; three- 
class system of suffrage in, 1 50, 151; 
advantages of business cooperation 
shown by, 171; railway stations in, 
257, 258; compulsory insurance for 
working classes in, 346 ; cooperative 
societies in, 385 n. ; cautious wisdom 
of Socialists in, 408; minimum wage 
boards in, 414; socialization of subur- 
ban land in, 423. 

Get-rich-quick concerns, ,228. 

Gibbons, Cardinal, quoted to show con- 
servative spirit of Roman Catholic 
Church, 26. 

Giddings, Franklin H., quoted on public 
ownership, 436. 

Gladden, Washington, 9. 

Gladstone, W. E., on freedom, 196- 
197. 

Goethe, quotation from, S5 n. 

Golden Rule, inadequacy of, for present 
social needs, 45-46. 

Goldmark, Josephine, cited, 449. 

Goler, Dr. G. W., work of, relating to 
municipal supervision of milk supply, 
444 n. 

Gospel hymns, predominance of other- 
worldly desires shown in, 75. 

"Gospel of the Kingdom, The," 11 n. 

Gough, John B., 469. 

Gounelle, Elie, work by, 105 n. 



Government, control of, by the people 
in an economic democracy, 361-362. 

Government ownership, 370-371. See 
Public ownership. 

Great Britain, land taxation in, 392-393. 

Greece, conditions of life in ancient, 257, 
345 ; communistic democracies in, 377 ; 
relations of private and public life in, 
contrasted with present conditions, 
446-447. 

Gregory VII, Pope, quoted, 79 n. 



H 



Haldeman, I. M., pamphlet by, 56 n. 

Hardie, Keir, 109. 

Harnack, cited and quoted, 71, 81. 

Harvard University, courses in soci- 
ology at, 20 n. 

Heath, Richard, writings of, 70 n. 

Hegel, on the possession of property, 341. 

Herder, J. G. von, 88. 

History, new viewpoint for study of, 
since French Revolution, 327. 

Home, influence of Christianity on life 
of the, 134—136; the supreme institu- 
tion of love, 262-263 ; dangers to the, 
from modem industrialism, 263 ff . ; 
valuation placed upon by every one, 
263 ; prostitution a destroyer of the, 
269-270. 

Hours of labor, 414. 

Housing question, the, 416-417, 451. 

Howard, John, martyr and immortal, 
473 n. 

Huet, F., quoted, 344. 

Hughes, Charles E., 4. 

Hugo, Victor, quoted, 467. 

Human personality, miraculous power of 
the, 460-462. 

Humility, new valuation given to, by 
Christianity, 300. 

Hungar>% demand for manhood suffrage 
in, 189, 194. 

Hunter, Robert, "Poverty" by, cited, 
248. 



Ice, public ownership and supervision of 

supply, 442-443- 
Idleness, ethical badness of, 295, 
Illinois Steel Company, 287. 



484 



INDEX 



"Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis, 
III. 

Immigration, due to capitalistic interests, 
278. 

ImmoraUty, causes tending to multiply, 
266 ff. 

Indirect taxes, 428-42Q. 

Individualism, tinge of self-seeking in 
religious, 111-112; not the correct 
economic relation, 365-366; incom- 
parably stronger moral appeal made 
by socialism, 367 ; blunting of workers' 
individuality due to, 417-418. 

Industrial courts, 415 n. 

Industrial democracy, need of, 198-199 ; 
trades-unionism as an aid toward, 

357 ff. 

Industrial life, revolution of American, 
158-162. 

Industrial waste, 98, 170, 171, 178. 

Inheritance taxation, 427. 

Initiative, the, 3 ; Swiss origin of, 378. 

Injustice, undoing of Christian character 
of social order by, 333-335; is the 
obverse side of privilege, 336; reme- 
dies for leading forms of, 337-338. 

Institutionalized tradition, the power 
exercised by, 32-33. 

Insurance, form of property right rep- 
resented by, 345-346; systems of, for 
working classes, 346, 452. 

Insurgent movement in Western States, 
410. 

Intellectual standards, decline in, 316. 

Interest, taking of, prohibited by early 
Church, 379- 

Inventions, selfishness of private inter- 
est illustrated by, 277, 337, 338. 



Jaures, French socialist, quoted, 400. 

Jefferson, Thomas, 473. 

Jenks, J. W., "Great Fortunes" by, 
quoted, 226. 

Jesus, the social teachings of, 43 ; mean- 
ing of, in the Golden Rule, 46; diffi- 
culty of trying to imitate life of, 46 : 
purpose of Christianity in mind of, 
was the establishment on earth of the 
Kingdom of God, 49 ; our warrant from 
for modernizing and purifying the in- 
herited conceptions of the Kingdom of 



God, 56-57 ; his own treatment of the 
Kingdom idea, 57 ; evidences of prog- 
ress made by, in intellectual advance- 
ment, 58; his line of advancement, 
shown in his repudiation of revolution 
and bloodshed, 58-59 ; in his promul- 
gation of the doctrine of the brother- 
hood of man, 59-60; in laying down 
the law of service as the fundamental 
idea of his kingdom and his democrati- 
zation of the Kingdom idea, 60-61; 
in his indifference to mere ceremonial 
religion and insistence on human soli- 
darity, 61-62 ; in truly valuing the 
physical foundations of human Hfe 
but in placing higher value on the 
spiritual, 62-64; ^^ tiis avoidance of 
Utopian details and insistence on 
present duty, 64- 65 ; in his view of 
the immediate presence of the King- 
dom of God among men ; 65 ; in 
the summing-up, Jesus' grand aim was 
the social redemption of the human 
race on earth, 67 ; the other-worldly 
type of religion not the atmosphere 
in which he lived, 76 ; modern revival 
of the Kingdom idea marks the coming 
into his own of, 89-90; character of, 
that of a mature social Christian, in; 
the type of man as he is to be, the driv- 
ing force in the "christianizing" of 
the social order, 125-126; has been the 
great emancipator of humanity, 197 ; 
teachings of, on the curse of riches, 
292 ; the great conviction beneath 
teachings of, of the solidarity of man- 
kind, 327-328; social passion for fra- 
ternity intensified by influence of, 379 ; 
problems involving economic and in- 
dustrial life dealt with in dictum con- 
cerning God and Mammon, 459. 

Job, the worker's right to his, 347-351- 

Johnson, Tom L., 289, 305, 393, 469. 

Jones, "Golden Rule," 289, 305. 

Judiciary, capitalistic bias of the, 282. 

Justice, the most fundamental quality in 
the moral relations of men, 332; re- 
form of courts needed to secure, 332- 
333 ; is the foundation of the social 
order, S33 J conditions in America 
contrary to, 335-336; abolition of 
unjust privilege necessary to secure, 
337' 



INDEX 



485 



K 



Kant, Immanuel, 88; ethical common- 
wealth contemplated by, 88-89. 

Kingdom of God on earth, the first and 
essential dogma of the Christian faith, 
49 ; hindrances to a right understand- 
ing of Christ's conception of, 49-50 ; 
hope of, inspired by the Hebrew proph- 
ets, 50-53 ; apocalypticism and the, 
54-56; necessity of modernizing and 
purifying our inherited conceptions of, 
56-57 ; democratization of idea by 
Jesus, 59-61 ; the Utopian form of hope 
of, presented by apocalypticism, con- 
trasted with Jesus' outlook for, 64-65 ; 
according to Jesus, was among men 
even then, 65 ; a warm and loving 
human reality to Jesus, 66-67; the 
achievement of, was ever the one pur- 
pose of Jesus, 67-68 ; relapse of ideal 
after Jesus' death into pre-Christian 
apocalypticism, 71-72; in the Church 
the expectation of the visible return 
of Christ bound up with hope for, 72- 
73 ; the Church comes to regard itself 
as the, rather than an agency to create, 
78-79; a fractional part of the King- 
dom ideal really embodied by the 
Church, 79-80; how far short the 
Church fell of living up to the prin- 
ciples of the, 81 ; the Protestant Refor- 
mation not directly concerned with 
the question of, 85-86 ; slow develop- 
ment of idea, in Protestant theology, 
87-88; development of the idea, in 
the master minds of the eighteenth 
century, 88-89 ; ccntinued forging to 
the front of conception of, with the 
development of the modern spirit, 
89; what the modern revival of the 
Kingdom idea means to Jesus himself, 
89-90; spread of evolutionary ideas 
and the, 90; advance of social con- 
ception of, by home and foreign mis- 
sions, 90-91 ; vitality given to ideal 
by the enthusiasm for democracy, 91 ; 
religious power lent to the ideal of, 
by its connection with the new social 
enthusiasm, 91-93 ; effect on all reH- 
gious thinking of reentrance of con- 
ception into Christian thought, 94- 
95 ; how the faith of, is adapted to 



inspire and guide in christianizing the 
social order, 96 ff . ; is a religion for this 
earth and for the present life, 96-97 ; 
wastes no strength on religious para- 
phernalia, calls for no ceremonial, 97- 
98; religious value given to the plain 
man's job by, 98-100; demands the 
development of a Christian ethic for 
public life, loo-ioi ; positive attitude 
of attack inspired in Christians by, 
and its value, 101-102 ; the Christian 
demand for, a response to modern 
world's demand for liberty, 1 19-120; 
for the realization of, the adjustment 
of our economic life necessary, 458. 

Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 269-270; 
"Captains Courageous" of, 293. 

Kutter, Swiss Christian Sociahst, 117 n. ; 
work by and teachings of, 122 n. 



Labor, interest of churches and clergymen 
in problem of, 9, 12; unearned profit 
from exploitation of, 226-227. 

Labor movement, a beneficent reforma- 
tory influence, yet opposed by capital- 
ism, 290. 

Labor Sunday, observation of, 12. 

Labor trust, specter of a, 360. 

Labor unions. See Trades-unionism. 

La Follette, Autobiography of, quoted, 
286; mentioned, 304. 

Laissez faire, doctrine of, 432, 433-434. 

Land, resocialization of city, 422-425. 

Land grants to American railways, 277. 

Land taxation, as a remedy for injustice 
of the unearned increment, 338; in- 
fluence of Henry George's doctrines 
on, 392—393 ; replacing of house 
taxation by, 417. 

Laveleye, E. de, quoted, 325. 

Law, the conservative bent of, s^ ; in- 
vasion of the, by the business point 
of view, 317. 

Lawrence, Mass., strike, 264. 

Lawson, Thomas W., 469. 

Lawyers, responsibility of, to society. 

Laymen's Missionary Movement, 19. 

Leadership, indispensability of, in human 
society, 1 80-1 81 ; dangers of tyranny 
and despotism growing from, 1 81-18 2 ; 



486 



INDEX 



conferred by wealth, and its results, 

303-305. 

League for Social Service, of Methodist 
Church, 17. 

Leavitt, Julian, articles by, 283 n. 

Legislative investigations, 4. 

Life, profit vs., 242 ff . ; conservation of, 
412 ff. 

Life after death, influence of belief in, 
on eclipse of the social ideal of Chris- 
tianity, 73-76. See Other- worldH- 
ness. 

Limiting of pace of work by trades- 
unions, 390. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 304; quoted, 429. 

Liquor trade, the Methodists and the, 
23 ; example supplied by, of business 
in pursuit of profit, 209, 240; con- 
nection of, with sexual vice, 268-269 ; 
a case of the clashing of private interest 
and the common good, 276 ; total 
breaking off needed between trades- 
unionism and the, 456. 

Literature, corruption of taste for, under 
capitalism, 316. 

Livy, on war and the use of arms, 408. 

Lollards, the, 83. 

Longfellow, H. W., 304. 

'booking Backward," Bellamy's, 329. 

Love, a new social law of, needed, 43- 
44 ; high position of, as a great social 
instinct, 262 ; the home the greatest 
institution of, 262-263 ; perils which 
threaten, due to our economic system, 
264-271. 

Luther, Martin, 86. 

Lutherans, failure of, to take part in new 
social enthusiasm, 24. 



M 



McGlynn, Father? 91. 

Machine labor, evil effects of, 415, 417. 

Mafia, the, 273. 

Mammonism, the stamp of, on modern 
life, 165. 

Materialistic philosophy: of socialism, 
no; tendency of, toward an idealistic 
conception of the universe, 121 ; spread 
of, under capitalism, 315-319; in 
socialism, is the throwing of a great 
truth out of balance, 403. 

Mazzini, quoted, 41. 



Meat packing, profits from, under mo- 
nopoly conditions, 216. 

Melanchthon, Philip, 86. 

Men and ReUgion Forward Movement, 
19-20. 

Mennonites, the, 75. 

Methodist Church, declaration of, con- 
cerning social service, 13-14; League 
for Social Service of, 17; imxportant 
part to be taken by, in the social 
awakening, 23-24; losses from drop- 
ping of members, 116 n. 

Middleman, discussion of the, 202 ff., 
213; especially advantageous posi- 
tion of, under monopoly conditions, 
214-220; art and the, 259-260; illus- 
trates selfish interest rising superior 
to public welfare, 276 ; elimination of, 
under an economic democracy, 361 ; 
elimination of, by European coopera- 
tive associations, 385—386. 

Milk, public ownership and supervision 
of, 443-444- 

Mill, John Stuart, ideal of industrial 
democracy formulated by, 357 ; quoted 
on socialism, 367. 

Millet, relations of art and commercial- 
ism illustrated by case of, 260. . 

Milhonaires, sources of fortunes of, 230- 
231. 

Milton, John, 75. 

Milwaukee, socialism in, 394, 434. 

Mines, socialization of, 424-443, 

Minimum wage boards, 414. 

Ministers, growing interest of, in social 
problems, 9-10. 

Mirabeau, Count, 469. 

Mirbt, quotation from work by, 79 n. 

Missions, influence of foreign, in estab- 
lishing world-wide Christian civiliza- 
tion, 18-19 ; analogy between progress 
of the social awakening and, 28; ad- 
vance of social conception of Kingdom 
of God by, 90-91. 

Missouri Synod, conservative attitude of, 
24-25. ^ 

Monasteries, as communistic repubhcs, 
380-381. 

Money power, centralization of the, 286. 

Monopoly, effects of entrance of, into 
business, 214 ff . ; examples of business 
conditions under, 216-220; the un- 
earned profit derived from, 229-233 ; 



INDEX 



487 



millionaires' fortunes springing from, 
230-232; danger in subtlety of this 
form of spoliation, 232-233 ; the 
essence of class rule in, contrasted with 
the absence of class rule in democ- 
racy, 361 ; problem of resocializing 
monopolistic corporations, 425—426 ; 
natural monopolies, 435—437. 

Moral efficiency, dependence of, on reli- 
gious faith, 41. 

Morality, evil effects of profit-making 
business on standards of, 212—213. 

Mormon Church, a dangerous power 
within the State, 273. 

Mortality rate of tenement dwellers, 416. 

Mother, meaning accompanying word, 
128. 

Municipal ownership, 370-371. 



N 



National Progressive Party, socialism 
and the, 395. 

Natural monopolies, 435-437. 

Natural resources, abuse of, by capital- 
ism, 254, 421. 

Nearing, "Wages in the United States," 
cited, 248. 

Newspapers, capitalistic control of, 284- 
286, 289. 

New York City land, 422. 

New York Sun, Ust of rich men published 
in, 231 n. 

New York Tribune, cited on sources of 
millionaires' fortunes, 230. 

New Zealand, influence of the Single Tax 
doctrine in, 393. 

Niagara Falls, onslaught of commercial- 
ism on, 253. 

Noel, Conrad, cited, 70 n. 

Noyes, Alfred, quoted, 325. 



O 



Old-age pensions, 346, 347, 416. 

Open shop, autocratic aspect of em- 
ployers' insistence on the, 357-358. 

Other-worldHness, effect of, in eclipsing 
the social ideal of Christianity, 73- 
76 ; value of this type of religion, 75- 
76 ; not the atmosphere in which Jesus 
lived, 76 ; conclusion to be drawn from, 
as to force of the Christian religion, 76 ; 



reduction of abnormal, by the Protes- 
tant Reformation, 86-87 i religion of 
the faith of the Kingdom of God con- 
trasted with, 96-97, 98; neglect by, 
of effect of sins on society, 100. 
Owen, Robert Dale, 280. 



Pace-making, 390, 449. 

Palisades, commercialism and the, 253. 

Papacy, loss of temporal power of, 140. 

Parcels post, the express monopoly and 
the, 219, 420, 439. 

Parks, public, 440. 

Patent medicines, 209, 246; an illus- 
tration of the antagonism between pri- 
vate interest and public welfare, 276. 

Paternalism, analogy between benevo- 
lent-employer theory and, 356. 

Patriarchal family, the, 129-130. 

Patterson, Joseph Medill, 287. 

Peabody, Francis G., 20 n. 

Personality, power of the human, 460- 
462. 

Personal reHgion, moral force exerted by, 
103 ; question of effect of social Chris- 
tianity on, 103 ff . ; anxiety about, due 
to lack of faith in, 105 ; causes of 
collapse of, in certain cases, 106; re- 
discovery of the value of, by enthu- 
siasts who have turned away from, 
107; dangers to, from the influence 
of the social interest are temporary, 
in; tinge of self-seeking in some 
types of. III— 112. 

Personal work, loss of interest in, from 
interest in social work, 113-114. 

Pfotenhauer, F., quoted, 24-25. 

Philanthropists, burdens of, 298-299, 

309- 

Philippines, the school and the com- 
mercial corporation in the, 146. 

Phillips, Wendell, 8. 

Philosophy of Calvin and of socialism, 
no. 

Phosphorus poisoning in match industry, 
247. 

"Pilgrim's Progress," the religion of 
other-worldliness illustrated by, 75; 
quoted, 473-474- 

Playgrounds, public, 440. 

Pleasure, limitations to, 300-301. 



488 



INDEX 



Pleasures, public provision of wholesome 
social, 440-442. 

Poetry, decline in taste for, 316. 

Politics, as an example of the christianiz- 
ing process, 147-154; corruption in, 
280-283. 

Polyandry, practice of, 267-268. 

Postal savings banks, 434. 

Poverty, enthusiasm for, characteristic 
of pre-Ref ormation radical movements, 
84. 

Powderly, Terence V., 9. 

Presbyterian Church, General Assembly 
of, considers relation of the Church 
and Labor, 13 ; Department of Church 
and Labor of, 17 ; preeminence won by, 
in social study, 22 ; losses from drop- 
ping of members, 116 n. 

Press, capitalistic control of the, 284-286, 
289, 432. 

Prices under monopoly conditions, 215- 
218, 338. 

Primitive democracy, 375-376. 

Prison labor, 195 ; scandals connected 
with, 283 ; indefensibility of State 
participation in, 467. 

Private interests, growth of, and opposi- 
tion of, to public welfare in United 
States, 274 ff. ; examples of, 275-280; 
corruption of pohtics, legislative bodies, 
and courts by, 280-282 ; charitable 
agencies and reformatory organizations 
tainted by, 283 ; hand of, on the press, 
the railways, and the money of Amer- 
ica, 284—287 ; weakening of American 
freedom and spirit of self-reliance by, 
287-288; vindictiveness with which 
righteousness is fought by, 288-290; 
overgrowth of, has institutionalized an 
unchristian principle, 290. 

Private ownership of natural resources, 
tribute levied on community by, 229. 

Private salvation, religion of the past a 
religion of, 76, 100. 

Privilege, flourishing of, in America, 335- 
336; historical processes in building 
up of, 336-337 ; abolition of, necessary 
to christianize the social order, 337. 

Professions, commercializing of the, 317. 

Profit-making in schools, 144-145. 

Profit-sharing, 450-451. 

Profits, supremacy of desire for, in modern 
business, 165-166, 184, 205-206, 213; 



evil effects on character resulting from 
business run for, 21 1-2 13; increased 
demand for, with entrance of monopoly 
element, 214 ff . ; illegitimate methods 
of increasing, 215-217; thoroughness 
with which capitahstic system is 
dominated by, 222 ; the moral nature 
of profit, 223 ff. ; unearned profit, 225 
ff . ; unfairness and immorality of mo- 
nopoly profit, 233 ; the pitting of profit 
against life, 242 ff . ; responsibility for 
industrial accidents and diseases, 242- 
246 ; preferred to beauty and art, 252- 
261 ; the home threatened by, 264-265. 

Progress, naturalness and divinity of, 30 ; 
vital question for the social, of America 
as to what position American churches 
will take, 36-39. 

Property, the right to, 341 ff. ; changes in 
conditions of ownership of, by average 
Americans, 342-343 ; forms of com- 
mon property rights, 344-345; form 
of, found in right of a worker to his job, 
347-349 ; the socializing of, 419 ff. 

Prophets, the Hebrew, conception of the 
Kingdom of God inspired by, 50-53; 
were in reality revolutionists, 52 ; dif- 
ferences between, in outlook, spiritual 
purity, and ideals, 52-53; superseded 
to an extent by apocalypticism, 54-55. 

Prostitution, causes of, 265-267 ; the 
white slave traffic, 269; dangers of, 
to the health and the home, 269-270. 

Protective tariff, an example of privilege, 
31, 335- 

Public, the, organ of the Single Tax move- 
ment, 365. 

Public life, development of a Christian 
ethic for, demanded by the conception 
of the Kingdom of God, loo-ioi. 

Public money, socialization of, 428. 

Public ownership, 338, 419-429; opposi- 
tion of capitalistic business to, 43 2 ; 
doctrine of laissez faire and, 433—434. 

Public spirit, community life and, 430 ff. ; 
reasons for lack of, 431. 

Public Trustee Act in England, 434- 

435- 

Public welfare, antagonism between pri- 
vate interest and, 272 ff. 

Publishing houses, literature on social 
questions put out by denominational, 
20. 



INDEX 



489 



Pullman Company, an example of busi- 
ness under monopoly conditions, 217. 
Pure Food and Drug Act, 209, 213, 289. 



Quakers, the, 75 ; superiority of, to the 
tyranny of fashion, 256. 



R 



Ragaz, Leonhard, 117 n. 

Railways, selfishness of private interest 
illustrated by, 277-278; concentra- 
tion of control of, 286 ; public owner- 
ship of, 433- 

Railway stations and railways, lack of 
art in, 257-258. 

Real estate, speculation in, 417; re- 
socialization of, 422-425. 

Recall, the, 3, 181, 282, 362, 428. 

Reedy, W. M., on the ''Myth of a Free 
Press," 285-286, 289. 

Referendum, the, 3 ; Swiss origin of, 378. 

Reformation, characteristics of radical 
movements that preceded the, 83-85 ; 
theology of, not concerned with social 
teachings, 85-86 ; profound changes 
inaugurated by, and their bearing on 
modern science, democracy, and social 
renovation, 86—87 ; part enacted by, 
in the christianizing, of the Church, 
140-141. 

Reformatory institutions, traces of 
selfish private interests in, 283. 

Reformers, obstacles placed in paths of, 
288-290. 

Religion, power of, beneficent and other- 
wise, 34; moral force exerted by per- 
sonal, 103 ; question of effect of social 
Christianity on, 103 ff . ; alienation of 
working classes from, in Europe, 108 ; 
hostility of continental socialism to, 
108-110; practical test of, to which 
social Christianity measures up, of 
creating a larger life and the power of 
growth, 113; is not dying, but chang- 
ing to meet the needs of the time, 1 20- 
121; escape of, from materialistic 
sway of capitalism, 319 ff. ; necessary 
steps toward the revival of, 458 ff. 
See also Personal religion. 

Religious Education Association, 17. 



Religious men and the question of social- 
ism, 396-400. 

Revenue system, resocialization of our, 
428. 

Revival of religion, 458 ff. 

Revolution, rejection of, by Jesus, 58- 
59; smallness of risk of, from social- 
ism, 408-409. 

Revolutions, suppression of abiHty under 
conditions of injustice proved by, 334- 
335- 

Reynolds, George M., on concentration 
of control of money power, 286. 

Rich, tragic position' of the, 291-310; 
problem of the conversion of the, 467- 
475. 

Right to employment, the, 347-351. 

Riis, Jacob, cited, 416. 

Riparian rights, need of changing laws 
governing, 425. 

Ritschl, Albrecht, quoted, 70 n. 

Roberts, Theodore, quoted, 462. 

Rochefoucauld, quoted, 462. 

Rochester, N. Y., lack of art in railway 
station at, 258 n.; illustration in, of 
need of socializing water rights, 425 ; 
banquet to newly naturalized citizens 
in, 441. 

Rockefeller, J. D., 298. 

RoUand, Romain, cited on Millet, 260. 

Roman Catholic Church, attitude of, 
to the social movements, 25-27 ; illus- 
trations of conservatism of, 34-35 ; 
part taken by, in American Revolution 
and in Latin American revolutions, 
37-38; question of consistency in 
opposing socialism, 381 ; opposition of, 
to social center idea, 442. 

Rome, relations of private and public Hfe 
in ancient, 446-447. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, on the Progressive 
Party as a corrective of socialism, 395. 

Ross, E. A., works by, cited and quoted, 
185, 280-281, 282-283, 317, 431. 

Rubens, enforced lowering of genius of, 

259- 

Ruskin, on the "economic man," 185; 
on the five great intellectual profes- 
sions, 221 ; on art and the moral life, 
252; summing-up of the rich and the 
poor by, 294-295 ; quoted, 322. 

Ryan, John A., program of reform of, 
27. 



490 



INDEX 



Sabatier, Paul, "Life of St. Francis" of, 
84 n. ; anecdote of Jaures by, 400 n. 

Salvation, attainment of, always a social 
process, 114-115 ; is a social force and 
is exerted by groups charged with 
divine will and love, 116-117. 

Sangnier, Marc, 35 n. 

Savings of the average American family, 
342. 

Schaff, Philip, *' Creeds of Christendom" 
by, cited, 21. 

Schiller, on the possession of property, 

341. 

SchmoUer, quoted, 386. 

School uniforms for children, 446. 

Schools, the christianizing process shown 
by, 142-147. 

Science, conflicts between religion and, 
ended by social Christianity, 118; 
triumphs of our era due to, rather 
than to capitalism, 236-237. 

Scudder, Vida D., quoted, 298. 

Self-restraint, the want of, due to profit- 
making business, 211. 

Senate, United States, corruption of, 
2-3, 281-282. 

Senators, direct election of, 362. 

Service, glorification of mutual, by the 
rehgion of the Kingdom of God, 98- 
100. 

Shaftesbury, Lord, work of, for the op- 
pressed classes, 460, 470-471. 

Sheldon, Charles M., influence of books 
of, 46. 

Shoe-making, industrial revolution illus- 
trated by, 1 60-1 61. 

Sickness, insurance of working classes 
against, 346, 415. 

Sillon, the, in France, 35 n. 

Simons, ''Social Forces in American 
History," cited, 275, 280, 290, 355. 

Sin, viewed as a social force, 116. 

Single Tax philosophy, individualism 
of the, 365 ; discussion of, as a creed 
of social salvation, 391-394; method 
recommended by, of socializing land, 

423. 
Skepticism of socialists, no. 
Slavery, inefficiency and dearness of 

labor under, 195-196. 
Social centers for communities, 441-442. 



Social Christianity, effect of, on personal 
religion, 103 fl.; is a distinct type of 
personal religion, 104; dangers from, 
are of a temporary character, 111-113 ; 
larger life and power of growth created 
by, 113; wherein an improvement on 
the evangelism of the individualistic 
gospel, 114; is especially adapted to 
win and inspire modern men, 117 ff.; 
ends the conflicts between religion and 
science, 118; removes the obstacle 
that rehgion is "against the people," 
1 1 8-1 19; fusing of, with old religious 
faith, 122; examples of working of, 
in the family, the Church, the educa- 
tional system, and the state, 123-155 ; 
is not, then, an untried or unsuccessful 
venture, 155; urgent need of applica- 
tion of, to business, 199-201. 

Social conservatism. See Conservatism, 
social. 

"Social Creed of the Churches, The," 
15 n. 

Social efficiency of early Christian 
churches, 77-78. 

Social Ethics, chairs of, at theological 
seminaries, 21. 

Social ideal of early Christianity, reasons 
for long eclipse of, 69 ff . ; in the eman- 
cipation of Christianity from its early 
Jewish environment and its transition 
to the Greek environment, 70-71; 
in the change of the form in which the 
social hope was presented, 71-73; 
in the ascendency of the other-worldly 
hope, 73—76; in the ascendency of the 
organized institutionalized Hfe of 
Christianity, — the Church, 76-81 ; 
emergence from eclipse dating from 
dawn of modern democracy, 83. 

Socialism, fight of Roman Catholic 
Church against, 27 ; position of, toward 
the Kingdom-of-God ideal, 91 ; hostil- 
ity of continental, to religion, 108-110; 
ingredient of anticlericafism in, 109- 
iio; modern science and skepticism 
in, no; mercifulness of criticism by, 
200; use that science may be put to 
under a regime of, 236-237 ; free-love 
theories found in, 270, 403 ; a benefi- 
cent influence, but opposed by the 
capitaHstic world, 290; view of, as a 
great movement for the democracy 



ii 



INDEX 



491 



of labor, 357 ; the strong moral appeal 
made by, 367 ; J. S. Mill quoted con- 
cerning, 367 ; doubtful consistency 
of the CathoUc Church, in opposing, 
381 ; discussion of, viewed as a power 
of the coming age, 394 ff . ; is the neces- 
sary spiritual product of capitalism, 
and is the latter' s Nemesis, 394—395 ; 
moral power of the cause, 395 ff. ; the 
Progressive Party and, 395 ; dilemma 
of reHgious men concerning, 396-398; 
narrow-mindedness of contempt of, 
for religion, 400; philosophy of, will 
be balanced by time and experience, 
401-402 ; question of continued teach- 
ableness of, 402—403 ; wdll rid itself 
of objectionable elements, 403-404; 
undoubtedly a chief power of the 
coming age, 405 ; no desire . for a 
force revolutionary movement by 
great body of Socialists, 409. 

Socialist Party, point of view and the 
interests of the working class repre- 
sented by, 454. 

Socialists, doctrine of, contrasted with 
Jesus' teachings, 63. 

SociaHzing of property, 419 ff. 

Social order, what is meant by chris- 
tianizing the, 125; is not christianized 
where unspeakably bad conditions 
of life exist, as in, American cities, 
198. 

Social problem, increasing interest of 
churches in, 7 ff . ; what constitutes 
the modem, 8 ; attitude of Methodists 
and other Protestant churches toward, 
13-17; work of the Y.M.C.A. and 
the Y.W.C.A., 17-18; part taken by 
foreign missions in, 18-19; the Men 
and Religion Forward Movement, 
ig-20 ; awakening of interest in, showm 
by denominational publishing houses 
and theological seminaries, 20-21 ; 
incompleteness of awakening of 
churches to interest in, 24; failure 
of the Lutherans to share in, 24-25 ; 
attitude of the Roman Cathohc 
Church, 25-27 ; necessity of a great 
religious faith for inspiration in attack- 
ing, 40 ff. 

Social service, declaration of Methodist 
Church concerning, 13-14. 

"Social Standards for Industry" formu- 



lated by Committee on Standards of 
Living and Labor, 413 n. 

Social terrorism in America, 407-408. 

Solidarity, principle of, in trades- 
unionism, 388-389. 

Sombart, Werner, quoted, iJb, 245; on 
the hostility of sociaHsm to religion, 
404 n. 

Sorrowing, consolation to the, from social 
work, 475-476. 

South End Settlement, Boston, 20 n. 

Spargo, John, "Substance of Socialism" 
by, cited, 200 n. 

Speculation in city lots, immorality of, 
417. 

Speculative method in business, 165-166, 
210. 

Spurgeon, Charles H., 330. 

State, christianizing process applied to 
the, 147-154; limitations placed on 
immoraHties of capitalism by the, 239. 

Stelzle, Charles, 12, 23. 

Stewardship, new stress placed on doc- 
trine of, by the Church, 44-45. 

Stewart, Charles J., 435. 

Stock gambling, 212. 

Stock Exchange, New York, centraliza- 
tion of power over, 286. 

Strikes, industrial conditions revealed by, 
186-190; sublimity of sympathetic, 
as demonstrations of altruism and 
solidarity, 389-390. 

Strong, Josiah, 9, 11 n. 

Student Volunteers, 19 ; additional pledge 
desirable for, 475. 

" Studies in American Social Conditions," 
II n. 

Suffrage, extension of the, as proof that 
democracy is not a failure, 354-355- 

Sun Yat Sen, power of the human per- 
sonality illustrated by, 460. 

Survey, article from, quoted, 246 ; value of 
the, 406 n. 

Switzerland, fragments of primitive com- 
munity life in, 378. 

Sympathetic strike, the, 389-390. 



Taborites, the, 83. 

Tariff, the American, an object lesson in 
the power of the conservative interests, 
31 ; an example of privilege, 335. 



492 



INDEX 



Taxation, and monopoly, 232; land, 338, 
392-393, 417, 423; inheritance, 427; 
revenue, 428; indirect, 428-429. 

Taylor, Graham, 20 n. ; quoted and cited, 
288, 445. 

Teaching jDrofession, status of the, 144- 
14s, 31^317. 

Telegraph, the middleman under mo- 
nopoly conditions illustrated by, 219- 
220; public ownership of, 434. 

Theological seminaries, study of social 
questions in, 20-21. 

Thomas a Kempis, self-centered piety of, 
111-112. 

Tobacco Trust, an illustration of antag- 
onism between private interest and 
public welfare, 276. 

Tolstoy, protest of, against riches, 292. 

Trades-unionism, an institutionalized 
expression of dissatisfaction, 191, 192 ; 
the meaning and purpose of, 357 ff. ; 
ill efifects of policy of suppression of, 
359; should be facilitated and regu- 
lated by law, 359-360; ethical values 
in, differentiating it from capitalistic 
corporations, 388-389; limiting of 
pace of work by, 390; reasons for 
frequent bitterness, roughness, and 
violence of, 391 ; an essential to the 
rise of the working class, 453-454 ; dis- 
continuance of relations with liquor 
trade demanded, 456 ; fraternal quali- 
ties brought out by, 457. 

Tradition, power of institutionalized, 
ovdr social conservatism, 32-33. 

Tuberculosis, waste by, 98. 

Tucker, President W. J., 20 n. 

Tyranny, danger of leadership verging 
into, 181. 



U 



Unearned increment, questionable mo- 
rality of the, 212; injustice of, 337; 
remedy for, 338. 

Unearned profit, sources of and moral 
basis for, 225-234; from levies laid on 
labor, 226-227; made at the expense 
of the community, 227-228; from 
private ownership of natural resources, 
229; from monopoly ownership, 229- 

233. 
Unearned wealth, effects of, 297 ff. ; pos- 



sessors of, are victims of our social sys- 
tem, unable to save others or them- 
selves, 310; taxation of, to help the 
working people, 346. 

Unemployed, rise of the working class 
held down by the, 451. 

Union labor, efforts of churches to get in 
touch with, 12. See Trades-unionism. 

Union Settlement, established by Union 
Theological Seminary, 20 n. 

Unitarians, stand taken by, on social 
questions, 16. 

United States Steel Corporation, power 
of, originating in monopolies, 232. 

Universities, fraternal community life of, 

"Unto Me," Rauschenbusch's, men- 
tioned, 121 n. 

Utopian hopes, Jesus' freedom from, 
64-65. 

Utopias, artificiality of man-made, 328- 
329. 

V 

Valerius, Publius, Roman patriot, 475. 

Vedder, H. C, work by, cited, 70 n. 

Vice, the origins of, 265 ff. 

Violence, use of, by striking laborers, 191- 
192, 408-409. 

Voltaire, a destroying angel using Chris- 
tian weapons, 154. 



W 



Wage boards, 454. 

Wages, statistics of, of industrial workers, 
264 ; vice resulting from low, 266-267 \ 
publicity demanded for scales of, 414. 

Wagner, Professor, on speculation in 
real estate, 417. 

Waldenses, the, 83, 84. 

War, selfishness of capital displayed in 
times of, 278-279. 

Ward, Harry F., "Social Creed of the 
Churches" edited by, 15 n. 

Washington, George, 304. 

Waste, our national, especially of the 
power of religion, 98 ; of the competi- 
tive system, 170, 171, 178; of natural 
resources, 421. 

Water power, socialization of, 425. 

Weiss, Johannes, work by, cited, 88. 

White, WilHam Allen, cited, 3, 293. 



INDEX 



493 



White slave traffic, 265, 269. 

Wiclif, John, 85. 

Williams, Leighton, 94 n. 

Wills, government limitation of rights 
pertaining to, 427. 

Woman's dress, beauty, and commerce 
in, 255-257. 

Women, improvement in position of, 131 ; 
conservation of, 413, 414. 

Woods, Robert A., 20 n. ; quoted, 114. 

Work, the law of, 295-297. 

Working classes, alienation of, from reli- 
gion, in Europe, 108; systems of 
insurance for, against accident, sick- 
ness, and old age, 346; means and 
measures for the rise of, 448 flf. ; im- 
portance of the, for the moral future of 
humanity, 448-449 ; point of view and 



the interests of, represented by the 
Socialist Party, 454. 
Workingmen, property as a means of 
grace for, 341 ff . ; right of, to employ- 
ment, 347-351. 



Young, duties to society of the, 475. 
Young Men's Christian Association, 

constructive social service of, 17-18. 
Young Women's Christian Association, 

efforts of, relating to social questions, 

18. 

Z 

Zachariae, "BUcher vom Staat" by, 

quoted, 392. 
Zeller, quotation from, 364. 



npHE following pages contain advertisements of 
Macmillan books by the same author, and 
books of related interest. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Christianity and the Social Crisis 

8vOj 4J0 pages, cloth, gilt top, $i.jo net 

This book is a discussion of the position the church must as- 
sume in the face of the approaching social crisis. The first 
chapters are historical, and set forth the religious development 
of the prophets of Israel, the life and teachings of Jesus, and the 
dominant tendencies, of primitive Christianity, in order to ascer- 
tain what was the original and fundamental purpose of the great 
Christian movement in history. Out of this historical survey 
grows the conclusion that the essential purpose of Christianity 
was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by re- 
generating and reconstituting all human relations. Successive 
chapters deal with the reasons why the Christian church has 
never undertaken to carry out this fundamental purpose of its 
existence ; the conditions which constitute the present social 
crisis ; the vital interest of the church in the social movement ; 
and the contributions which Christianity can make, and the di- 
rections in which the religious spirit should exert its force. In 
his account of social conditions and tendencies, the author has 
drawn on his experience of eleven years as a pastor among the 
working people of New York City. 

^* It is of the sort to make its readers feel that the book was 
bravely written to free an honest man's heart ; that conscientious 
scholarship and hard thinking have wrought it out and enriched 
it ; that it is written in a clear, incisive style ; that stern passion 
and gentle sentiment stir at times among the words, and keen 
wit and grim humor flash here and there in the turn of a sentence. 
It is a book to like, to learn from, and, though the theme be sad 
and serious, to be charmed with." — JV. V. Times^ Sat. Review 
of Books, 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



A Psychological Study of Religion: 
Its Origin, Function, and Future 

By JAMES H. LEUBA 

Cloth^ 8vOy $2.00 net; post paid, $2.16 

Professor Leuba has long been known by his researches in the psychology 
of rehgious life. His doctor's thesis (1896) on "The Psychology of Conver- 
sion " was the first attempt at an analysis and explanation of religious life from 
the point of view of contemporary psychology. A. Binet, then director of the 
psychological laboratory of the Sorbonne, Paris, called that essay '* A work of 
unquestionable originality and great philosophical import." In 1904 Professor 
Lindley, of the University of Indiana, wrote of Professor Leuba's contributions : 
*' * Epoch-making ' is a sorely tattered word in these days. In considering all 
the contributions of this author, however, one seems justified in saying that in 
a real and high sense he is a * Bahnbtecher.' " 

This is not a work of vulgarization. The problems are attacked in an 
original manner, in many places new criticisms of old theories, and in others 
new explanations and conceptions are offered. This is particularly the case in 
the chapter in which " Dynamism " is set forth as the primitive philosophy, in 
the chapters on the nature and classification of magic and its relation to re- 
ligion, on the origin of the ideas of unseen personal beings, on the emotions 
in religion, and in the long chapter in which the psychological foundation of 
contemporary theology is discussed. 

But although scientists in various fields and philosophers will find in this 
book much to repay the reading of it, the layman will not think it fit for the 
specialist only. His attention will be sustained by the intrinsic interest of the 
problems with which it deals, the vividness of the style, and the abundance of 
the illustrations taken from biographies or from the writings of distinguished 
contemporaries. One of the characteristics of the book is its concreteness. 
This is particularly true of the chapter on the relation of theology to psy- 
chology, in which is considered the nature of the " inner experiences " to which 
modern theologians point as the ultimate ground of their faith. That chapter 
begins with " documental evidences " in which appear the names of a number 
of well-known living professors of theology and leading clergymen of this and 
of other countries. 

The book is not controversial, but since its author assumes squarely the 
scientific attitude and deals with problems that are vital to religion, it cannot 
fail to excite discussion, which, it is hoped, will contribute to a clarification of 
the theological situation. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Heart of the Christian Message 

By Dr. GEORGE A. BARTON 

Professor of Biblical Literature and Semitic Languages in Bryn Mawr College 

Cloth, i2mo, $i.2j net 

Beginning with the essential and distinctive teaching of Christ, 
Dr. Barton shows the form that that teaching took in the writings 
of the Apostle Paul, shows that teaching in relation to the primi- 
tive church, to the time of the Reformation, the period of the 
rise of the Quakers and to our own day. The book in other 
words is a compact, simple, effective and discriminating account 
of what the relation of Christ has meant to successive epochs. 
It will undoubtedly provoke thought on the relation of Chris- 
tianity to the problems of the present time. 



Jesus 



By GEORGE HOLLEY GILBERT 

Author of " The Interpretation of the Bible," etc. 

Cloth, i2mo, %i.25 net 

The Historical Jesus and the Legendary Jesus — these are 
the two main parts into which Dr. Gilbert divides his discussion, 
which is preceded by an introductory section on the sources and 
supplemented by a complete index of the sources. Under the 
Historical Jesus are considered Jesus's origin and birth, Jesus 's 
entrance on a public career, what Jesus thought of Himself, the 
ideal of Jesus for His people and the public career of Jesus. 
Under the Legendary Jesus one chapter is devoted to legends of 
the birth and infancy of Jesus, one to legends of Jesus's public 
ministry, and one to the legend of a material resurrection. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



A History of the Literature of Ancient Israel 
from the Earliest Times to 135 B.C. 

By henry THATCHER FOWLER 

Of Brown University 

Cloth, Svo, $2.^0 net 

This is the first work in English to set forth in chronological order the 
history of the Old Testament and earliest apocryphal writings, presenting 
the orderly development of Israel's thought and its changing forms of ex- 
pression from the oldest fragments of folk song to the completion of the 
later Old Testament books. The author's purpose has been to show the 
vital relationship between the writings and the history of the people. 

Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate 

Reminiscences of the 

Right Reverend HENRY BENJAMIN WHIPPLE, D.D., LL.D. 

Bishop of Minnesota 

New edition^ illustrated, cloth, i2mo^ $2.og net 
This new and cheaper edition of an ever popular autobiography con- 
tains all of the material included in the more expensive issue, long out 
of print. The steady demand for it from those who wish to know of 
Bishop Whipple's missionary activities, particularly of his work in con- 
nection with the Indians in the Northwest and in the founding of 
schools, has led to its republication. 

Just Before the Dawn 

By ROBERT ARMSTRONG 

Illustrated, cloth, i2mo, $i.jo net 
The Japanese religion and social customs presented from the view- 
point of the Japanese — this is what '' Just Before the Dawn " is. While 
specifically concerned with the life and teachings of Ninomiya Sontoku, 
the peasant sage of Japan, there is presented through this story of the 
great farmer, and the cult which grew up arou'nd him, a graphic picture 
of the actual daily life of the Japanese. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



THE HARTFORD-LAMSON LECTURES ON THE 
RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD 

These lectures are desio^ned primarily to give students preparing for the 
foreign missionary field a good knowledge of the religious history, beliefs, and 
customs of the peoples among whom they expect to labor. 

Volumes in the Series now Ready 

By FRANK BYRON JEVONS 

Principal of Bishop Hatfield's Hall, Durham University, Durham, England 

An Introduction to the Study of 
Comparative Religion 

1 O Llot/iy i2mo^ pi 'SO net 

" It is intended as a defence of Christianity and also as a help to the Christian mission- 
ary, by indicating the relation of Christianity to other religions. It is an admirable intro- 
duction to the subject, clear in style, sound in method, and with a comprehensive grasp of 
facts. Of especial value is the emphasis placed on the social power of religion and of the 
way in which, in Christianity, society and the individual are mutually ends and means to 
each other. The book may be cordially commended, especially to those who are begin- 
ners or those who wish a treatment that is free from technical difficulties." 

— New York Times, 

By Dr. J. J. M. DE GROOT 

The Chinese Religion 

O Clomj i2mo, $0.00 

A scholarly and detailed account of the intricate religions of the Chinese — which up 
to late years have been impenetrable puzzles to the Occidental mind. The author is one 
of the best authorities on the subject which the world possesses. 

By DUNCAN BLACK MacDONALD, M.A., D.D. 

Sometime Scholar and Fellow of the University of Glasgow; Professor of Semitic 
Languages in Hartford Theological Seminary 



Aspects of Islam 



Cloth, 121710, $1.^0 net 



This valuable contribution to the study of comparative religion is the third in the series 
of Hartford-Lamson Lectures, following the publication of Principal Jevons' " Introduction 
to the Study of Comparative Religion," and Dr. De Groot's " The Religion of the Chinese." 
Dr. MacDonald has written a book which will appeal especially perhaps to the beginner 
and the general reader, for he has dealt in broad outlines and statements, and not in 
details and qualifications. At the same time he is absolutely accurate as to conditions, 
despite the fact that in all probability some " Arabists " will be surprised at many of the 
things he has set down. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New Tork 



NOV 21 1912 



0-/3. 






f 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



:fi?>'i>j 



n in.i:ri 



:ilii 



sW'i : 






t ■ , 




013 377 312 



8 







'.'•i>:i 



I^'.il-iM'vrKlli 



i 



♦. 



'iil 



: <• ^i 



;H[.!:i;:!;>::-.'::v;!!:;i!i!!';,!iii;r-tl^ 




